You misunderstand OP. They seem to be a leftist, not a conservative. They find it ironic that the word recuperate (which has origins in the left) was recuperated or "sanewashed" by this article. It's actually interesting and kind of amusing.
I was not starting such a discussion. I'm baffled by your comment and can only assume you're reading my comment through an American lens, which is half foreign to me (only half because I'm exposed to so much of it on the Internet).
Interesting. Having read the article I noted some of the talking points I regularly hear on Sirius Patriot channel ( and I assume used in other right wing media ) including Che ridicule. It is pretty effective in that regard.
I personally saw r/antiwork as another incarnation of OWS. Only difference is that it was online ( so perception only ) and antiwork was very effectively destroyed via character assassination. I am sure it will be studied in terms of PR engagement and social manipulation.
Guy went on Fox news (against the communities) wishes and made millions of people's first impression of r/AntiWork to be negative.
In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform.
Most of the sub (I'd wager >80%) are Americans asking for workers rights that are the norm in western Europe. Things like paid maternal/paternal leave, greater work life balance and paid overtime, flexibly working and WFH.
The majority of people in America are almost certainly in favour of that, but you get a dog walker going on TV on a notoriously provocative network talking about "anti-work" it's just mind boggling.
In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform.
That was the biggest thing in my opinion. AntiWork was too open to the type of people who don't care about workers' rights and were just there because they think the world owes them a living. NEETs are horrible for the cause of labor reform.
It's against the rule to say that you did not read the article, so I won't say it, but:
> In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform.
/r/WorkReform exists already.
> Most of the sub (I'd wager >80%) are Americans asking for workers rights that are the norm in western Europe. Things like paid maternal/paternal leave, greater work life balance and paid overtime, flexibly working and WFH.
This is the author's point, that before /r/antiwork realigned itself, their moderator was actually representative of the average /r/antiwork user, that through an influx of left-aligned users, it got "sanewashed". These new users were ashamed of being associated with the original mod, but that mod is still very much the one that was dicussing legitimate /r/antiwork ideas before we ever heard of their fringe community.
> It's against the rule to say that you did not read the article, so I won't say it
Maybe it should be against the rules to say you know it's against the rules, and so on recursively. This loophole is often exploited to make these remarks equally useless and extra snarky.
The spirit of the rule isn't that you can't point out when the article addresses the exact questions that the parent is asking:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
My comment sole focus is not that parent didn't read the article. Instead, I chose to answer the comment's question with the answers from the article.
> Useless and extra snarky.
Making a top comment based on an article headline, with no knowledge of what is actually discussed is what's useless and against the HN discussion spirit where we usually try to foster meaningful conversations.
> It's against the rule to say that you did not read the article, so I won't say it, but:
>> In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform.
> /r/WorkReform exists already.
Could have been shortened to
>> In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform.
I happened upon the r/AntiWork comments section from time to time before that Fox News segment and it always struck me as full of people who were making every excuse not to take responsibility for their own circumstances and who have a fantasy that low skill jobs should some how pay enough to be life long careers instead of viewing them as stepping stones to bigger and better things.
That is the "sanewashed" viewpoint. The original message of r/antiwork was that nobody should have to work to live a comfortable life in modern society, and their needs should be provided by others who do.
What would provide for people? It seems to me we would either all starve and die, AI would do it for us (impossible in its current state), or we rely on effectively slave labor of poorer countries (which would mean work is not abolished for everyone).
Thanks for the response. There are some interesting ideas on hat site. I guess this is another example of something discussed extensively in the rest of the thread, the name/slogan of the movement not using the conventional meaning of terms.
There are a lot of low skilled jobs in a service economy. I imagine that a significant fraction of all jobs are low skilled ones. Not everyone is chasing the hustle or whatever either, so there's a significant amount of people will be working those low skilled jobs their whole lives. What quality of life do they deserve? Does society want a permanent underclass that are treated miserably?
There's also a lot of overlap between these jobs and ones that were essential to keep society running during various lockdowns, so the value these jobs provide doesn't seem to be reflected in the remuneration.
What I don't understand is why many see it as acceptable for any business to pay less than a living wage under any circumstance, it's just a roundabout way of making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force
>so the value these jobs provide doesn't seem to be reflected in the remuneration.
that's because remuneration isn't based on value, it's based on market conditions. value merely provides an upper bound. as an extreme example, clean water provides near infinite value to you (you need water to survive, so you're willing to pay infinite dollars for it), yet you can get it from your tap at less than a penny per gallon.
>What I don't understand is why many see it as acceptable for any business to pay less than a living wage under any circumstance, it's just a roundabout way of making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force
But those people on welfare would receive welfare regardless of whether they're hired or not? I don't see how that's "making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force".
I don’t believe your premise that such a large share of the available jobs are low skill that there is no room for people to move on to something better. If you look at fast food for example I’m seeing there are about 2.5 million workers which is a tiny percentage of the overall workforce. Looking at the age distribution of the US work force you could staff every fast food restaurant with only 16-19 year olds and still only be employing about half of that age groups work force.
why would you seek out statistics for one single industry that you perceive as low skill rather than just finding low wage statistics specifically?
44% of U.S. workers are employed in low wage jobs with a median annual wage of $18,000. [1]
Sure we can staff fast food with only 16-19 year olds but what about every other sector of the service industry and the myriad of other "low skill" jobs? are there 40 million plus "high skill" jobs out there waiting for the taking? The answer is no. [2]
For me antiwork is just anti forced wage labour. If we had a universal basic income, then that would be accomplished and people would be free to work on whatever they want. If technology is advanced enough to be able to afford this which I'd argue is already the case, I don't see why this shouldn't be the case.
Technology isn't advanced enough to be able to afford this. Have you ever actually worked in a factory or on a farm? Have you done the math to calculate how much taxes would have to raise in order to give everyone a UBI at even the US federal poverty level? This is magical thinking disconnected from the reality of how the economy works.
Related to this, but is there ANY explanation out there from proponents of UBI that would clarify how UBI can be done sustainably and perpetually, without causing runaway inflation where UBI is always below poverty level anyway?
I'm obviously too retarded for such an advanced concept, but in my head there's no scenario where a utopian UBI-based society is possible, even with more advanced tech. To allow everyone to have food, shelter, and other necessities regardless of their usefulness to society, at the very least we'd have to have severe birth rate restrictions, strong law enforcement, and other fun authoritarian systems that would no longer qualify the environment as a utopia in the eyes of UBI supporters.
Seems like yet another liberal pipe dream that is entirely disconnected from reality, though I'd love to be proven wrong, if anyone has some good reading suggestions on this subject.
Personally if I were in charge, I'd start by slowly phasing it in via distributing it from the proceeds of a land value tax (the most efficient tax, Henry George called this a citizen's dividend). Then the UBI amount is anchored and there's no possibility of runaway inflation.
I still don't get it. If rich people own land with value X, and you tax it and produce Y amount that gets distributed to everyone, doesn't that Y directly increase the cost of food and shelter or any other thing that the poor people would want to buy?
Moreover, what's to stop rich people from selling their land? Or abandoning it and moving to another country?
UBI doesn't make any sense to me as CONCEPT. Sure you can find some creative ways to raise some money this year and give it to the poor (or everyone), but how do you create a such a system that continues to function over years and decades?
Money that is given to someone just for existing inherently has no value, so it cannot possibly have much purchasing power. The only things it can buy are things that are subsidized by the government anyway and exists already, such as low income housing and food-stamp-eligible food. What I don't understand is that people seem to think UBI would somehow result in a higher standard of living for people who are already in low income housing and on food stamps, and I just can't think of a mechanism for that.
> I still don't get it. If rich people own land with value X, and you tax it and produce Y amount that gets distributed to everyone, doesn't that Y directly increase the cost of food and shelter or any other thing that the poor people would want to buy?
You seem to be presuming inelastic supply of all of the stuff they'd ever buy. This is relatively true for some stuff (housing supply in the largest urban markets).
But, most of these things are elastic and/or have larger world markets to bid against. Food, consumer goods, housing in other markets, etc. Therefore, while a UBI would be somewhat inflationary, it would still increase the purchasing power of the poor and lower middle class.
> The only things it can buy are things that are subsidized by the government anyway and exists already, such as low income housing and food-stamp-eligible food.
This isn't true, but this is the biggest benefit to UBI: unwind the administrative apparatus involved with entitlements, and remove the lower income regions which have over 100% effective marginal tax rates. A complicated patchwork of programs can be simplified and reduced in scope (SNAP, section 8, EITC, disability insurance, etc..) and we can ensure that people always have a positive marginal incentive to work. Milton Friedman himself proposed a UBI in a form of a "negative income tax" to avoid these economic distortions.
>For me antiwork is just anti forced wage labour. If we had a universal basic income, then that would be accomplished and people would be free to work on whatever they want
What type of living conditions are we looking to guarantee? If your baseline is "prehistoric living conditions", I'm sure it's quite affordable. If it's "21st century middle class america" it will be ruinously expensive. Incremental improvements in technology can eventually bring us to a point where we can afford to give arbitrary fixed standard of living to everyone, but not if that standard of living is constantly increasing.
A lot of the most popular threads had less to do with lifelong careers and more about being treated with basic human decency by your employer (and telling them off when the labor market turned in worker's favor).
That said, to address your point head on, is it possible in the US for everyone to move on to "bigger and better" things? I don't think so which is why we have so many adults with families in min. wage or lowing paying jobs. There is no pool of well paying jobs for them all to move into, there is no magic solution where everyone can have their needs met just by pulling harder on their bootstraps.
So the question then becomes: should a person (or two people) working a full time job be able to provide for themselves and their family? I think the answer to that question is yes. You might disagree, but I don't think its fair to write them off as having a "fantasy".
You cannot structurally expect everyone to have a good career in the us. It is not currently mathematically possible. Please don't delude yourself into thinking the economy could function the same as it currently does without lifelong service industry workers
there is no reason to believe that a service worker can't have a good career.
This may not be the case now, but that can change.
I'm always wary of paraphrasing Graeber, but it's possible that living in a world where a small handful of individuals own the majority of the wealth has led to the market rewarding various jobs in a way that creates more misery than is strictly necessary - for example corporate lawyers being paid hundreds of thousands because they can help billionaires get even richer, while farmers producing the most important of all resources, food, are constantly hovering around the poverty line.
EDIT:
and as a mathematician, I would appreciate a proof of your "mathematically impossible" proposition. :)
Sorry, I think you missed my point. My point is that our economy is currently structured with so many jobs paying too little, having no benefits, no pto/healthcare, that "people should just get a better job" argument doesn't hold water numerically. I think the solution to that is to ease the wealth gap.
What I'm noticing the past 5 to 10 years is the right outsmarting the left in activism and public imagery. Not with arguments, with wording. It's hard to watch.
One way I'm trying to make sense of is the following: The left is used to being the underdog, the ones fighting for reform against powerful, conservative institutions. They are used to not really stand a chance, it's the spirit that counts. In that position, it makes sense to yell loud, provoking slogans. The people in power will laugh it off, the people you're trying to reach will hear you. But we're in a situation where there are pockets of real power occupied by left-leaning leadership. University campuses. Some parts of the media. Large cities. Certain internet communities. The people in power (who are still largely conservative) are no longer laughing, they're scared. They will use your words against you if they aren't worded well. But it seems left-wing organizers refuse to change their tactics, refuse to acknowledge they entered the mainstream arena.
I still don't get what "abolish the police" is supposed to accomplish. Everyone who bothers understands what it is really about but you don't even have to twist the words, you just have to take them literally and it's a call to pure anarchism. The "blue lives matter" bullshit could have been stopped by changing the slogan to "black lives matter, too". A comedian should not be cancelled for actual, clear-in-context jokes, at least not when genuinely apologizing. A confused college student quoting some Jordan Peterson logic (which he'll likely feel embarrassed for in 5 years without any outside help at all) should not be yelled at in public or you get that shit on Tik Tok as "lefties suppressing free speech". Don't call your work reform movement... "anti-work". Sigh.
Laugh at right-wing stupidity. Take left-wing politics (i.e. European conservative politics) seriously and consider how to implement it in the real world. Do what the right has been doing for centuries, learn from it. They're in the defense now. And the most powerful move on the offense is appearing calm and composed.
> One way I'm trying to make sense of is the following: The left is used to being the underdog, the ones fighting for reform against powerful, conservative institutions.
This isn't necessarily true. The Democrats in the US had a near stranglehold on Federal politics from the 1950s through the mid-1990s. The Republican ascendence in the 1990s came about in part because Democrat-oriented institutions; e.g., large blue-chip companies, labor unions, and the Federal government itself were viewed as inefficient and corrupt by a portion of the voting population.
> But we're in a situation where there are pockets of real power occupied by left-leaning leadership. University campuses. Some parts of the media. Large cities.
This also isn't necessarily true. Democratic sympathies != left-leaning. And the actual truth is that, going on voting records alone, people in the US mainly vote based on whether they live in more or less densely populated regions. The institutions you've mentioned are all Democrat-leaning because they are predominantly located in more urban areas. Which makes sense, since the policies that Democrats generally support are all more effective at higher population densities.
Are the right really in defense mode? They managed to instill a majority in the supreme court, they have veto power in the senate and after 2022 will likely hold the majority in the house. They are successfully chipping away at the gains of the FDR era.
At the same time the left is fractured into two major camps. One camp is the leadership that seems to end up controlling major movements like Black Lives Matter and subduing it into nothing. This group chooses to not fight. They are benefiting from the status quo.
The other is the "progressive" left that is aiming for European style systems and policies. All they have as a weapon is Twitter and they are not really achieving their goals. What power do "Twitter People" really have if their efforts only translate into gestures from the higher ups(eg. BLM painted on the street in front of the capitol)?
I wonder what it's like to have such a naive black and white view of the world. You speak of left and right like it's a fantasy movie with some long narrative about good and evil. And you speak as though the concept of right and left has been an unchanging thing ("the right has been doing this for centuries"). Do you believe you are some stoic warrior engaged in a centuries long battle for some ideal?
Did you read any of the article? The whole point is that it was specifically a radical space, founded and filled by radicals, with a (somewhat) coherent radical message. The fact that there was a shift to "we should have mildly better working conditions within the same system" and "lol funny quitting text" may disqualify Doreen from being the representative, but the discussion being had here is how exactly that shift in the community's purpose is managed.
I'm extremely far from agreeing with the anarchist view of work, but your comment contains precisely the dynamic that the piece describes: a cause-focused community gains steam and followers, at which point the message is neutered (despite retaining a now-contradictory name) and those responsible for the movement's success are written out of history and ostracized as unrepresentative weirdos.
Seriously, I recommend reading the piece. It's too late to do so before commenting, but you may take away something more than "God why is this weirdo claiming that she represents antiwork when it's obviously just a board for bored teenagers to post memes about how they hate their job and tepid centrist messages about overtime pay"
A subreddit getting co-opted by the masses to change its intentions is a story as old as reddit. See my username for how I know that to be true.
Hopefully more subreddits will wake up and realize that being included in high activity feeds (r/all, popular) is not necessarily a good thing. We have.
> Speaking of unflattering stereotypes, let’s be blunt for a moment: Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people.
I think r/wallstreetbets is still a fantastic place and more or less true to its purpose of finding interesting and novel trades.
Much of the discussion has expanded, to discord (600K users, the limit) as well as the daily reddit talks (Think clubhouse but for reddit).
The daily thread is still fantastic for a very quick list of interesting topics, which you can jump into and have a conversation with anyone.
There still remains a decent sense of camraderie, but there are definitely fewer recognizable names amongst the volume of comments. More time being invested into handing out unique flairs will help with this
Weekday meme restrictions over the past week has largely undone all the damage to the main feed and brought back a larger array of high quality discussion.
Predictions add an interesting dimension to the subreddit where all users can participate regardless of personal wealth.
---
So overall, I'd say it's going very well. There seems to be a significant amount of misconceptions both in the general population, as well as even our regular users, but as long as we continue to do the right thing and protect discussion quality, people will slowly but surely see the light.
2020 was marked by a 10x increase in comment volume, largely coming from both incredible, pandemic driven, market volatility as well as stimulus checks and stay at home orders.
It is very unlikely (I hope) that this environment will happen again.
Nonetheless, can you express exactly what it is that "just [isn't] the same anymore"?
Not OP, but IMO WSB used to be interesting because it represented a small contrarian movement within the highly structured world of finance; a ‘secret club,’ if you will. I always browsed WSB primarily because it was fun, not because I expected to get mega-rich; after the GME blowup/meme-ification/massive media coverage, now everybody and their grandma trades OTM options (and now penny stocks and cryptos and NFTs etc etc) and it just isn’t cool anymore.
I agree, I think there's definitely been a large cultural shift when it comes to retail investing. Lots of people these days want to find the one play that gets them to retirement.
That culture shift extends well beyond WSB, but I think its at least somewhat less obvious here. In my experience, most of the time when people throw out price targets, at most they're predicting a 20%, 25% move, and not the 10x, 100x, or 10,000x you see elsewhere.
I don't think there's really a way, from a moderation perspective at least, to take the dreamers out of the equation... other then waiting and letting them get blown up by their high risk plays.
And just a note, r/wallstreetbets hasn't allowed penny stocks, crypto, or NFTs for many years. (NFTs never)
> but there are definitely fewer recognizable names amongst the volume of comments
I find this interesting because to me one of the biggest attractions to Reddit (and HN for that matter) is how deemphasized the user is. I almost never read usernames and rarely remember who anyone is.
That's a good point. The situation definitely has it's pros and cons.
For example, in the voice chats, its great when users follow up with one another on their trades, or know each other's specialties so they can call them to provide insight.
On the other hand, deemphasizing the user makes it more about the content and less about the person creating that content, which at best avoids bandwagoning and the whole "I called $foo, so listen to me when I say buy $bar".
> How exactly did it happen in /r/antiwork? Casuals found it. You know — the people who use the internet to laugh at funny memes rather than treating every post as a blow in a grand ideological struggle.
That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion, which in turn changes the original community.
As long as the popularity of a subreddit is below a certain threshold, it gets to foster specific discussions on whatever fringe ideology you are interested in, but it never stays that way for long.
I don't think most moderators don't know this option exists.
It's located on a page that you only visit once to set up the subreddit, or to make large subreddit changes. (On old reddit, not sure about new reddit)
To Reddit's credit, they have been adding new features over the years to help separate communities and ensure they are somewhat able to maintain their culture.
E.g. Crowd Control which limits the posting / commenting abilities of individual users based on their history or other heuristics.
How so? It's a black box algorithm owned by Reddit Admins. Moderators only have the ability to set the threshold, with very vague terms (low, moderate, high, or something similar)
If admins wanted to disappear a viewpoint, it would be a lot easier to just autosuspend the accounts, or shadowban without a trace.
Just because the admins can do (and have done) worse shouldn't make Crowd Control an acceptable measure by comparison. If anything, I'd say a black box algorithm dictated by the admins is worse than the preemptory auto-mod banning that goes on in a number of political subreddits. I have little confidence the admins won't eventually use it to police subs at a mass scale without the need of the moderator.
The one sub I know opts out of r/all is r/nfl. Which is kinda strange for such a rather non controversial topic, but judging by the treats on r/all probably wise.
>"I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all"
The /r/popular and /r/all pages are intensively manipulated by a constellation of leftist activists. Have you ever noticed just how often the same "screenshots of tweets" submissions from people like AOC end up being reposted ad nauseum across several subreddits that basically share the same message - and most importantly - moderators and power users?
Funny you mention u/LrlOurPresident, as I was tempted to mention that user specifically but didn't so my post wasn't too wordy. Their previous account IrlOurPresident was banned for manipulation but the admins don't seem to care in this situation.
> Almost every single post on r/MurderedByAOC is made by u/LrlOurPresident, and those posts hit the front page on a nearly daily basis.
Do you see the same content when browsing in an incognito window?
I ask because I've long suspected Reddit tracks even logged out users, and generates a front page showing them more of things that keep them on the site.
It's pretty clear from things like Bernie, the rise of antiwork, etc, etc, the site doesn't exactly align with the mainstream DNC talking points nearly as nicely as the front page and popular subs would make you think.
If the NFL craps astroturfing all over the online sports community that still constitutes manipulation even if the occupants of the sites in question were marginally more predisposed to those ideas than the general population. What the mainstream left does to Reddit with their astroturfing is no different.
There's a difference between a large amount of users who lean left making posts and comments that align with their views and what looks to be an obviously coordinated effort from a few dozen powermods and powerusers who seem to work 365 days a year to shape the content and discourse of the site through what appears on the frontpage and in the default subreddits.
Reddit corporate is exceptional at making you driven and angry, literally "engaged" with the website. Keeping Reddit account for fun stuffs only or leaving Reddit altogether, for couple months to years, or to never to return, is a great idea at every point of baseline spacetime that the Earth possibly traverse through.
Don't you think those Redditors are a bit too often bit too dumb to argue with? They ARE! 9/10ths are corporate shills and half of them are bots and the rest are complete boneheads, yeah yeah I agree wholeheartedly. Why not relieve yourself of duties and use that extra time to morally ascend yourself a bit? Watch them run into walls and cry from couple miles away. MSMs are gonna cover them, you won't be missing single bit of it.
Just quit. Click "logout". Going back is as easy as buying a pack of cigarettes and lighting it.
> That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion, which in turn changes the original community.
That's what I like about 4chan. In a sea of ungodly acidic garbage lies a golden heart of contrarianism. The posters will argue for a side one day, and 2 hours later will vehemently adopt opposite arguments. Some of the best leftist arguments I have ever read came from /pol/.
4chan argues for the sake of arguing, and I think that is absolutely beautiful in today's environment of everyone taking everything so seriously.
It probably has to do with the post incentives. On Reddit, if you get downvoted into oblivion, your post disappears even if you get thousands of comments. On 4Chan, the more active the post, the more it gets bumped to the top. So being inflammatory on one makes your post disappear, and on the other it sends it to the top of the feed.
This explains Twitter too. Even before the infamous trend-boosting algorithms get involved, being more controversial gets you more retweets and more chances to be seen. Tumblr used to be the same way and its users had similarly controversial/aggressive politics.
Reddit is grossly overmoderated. You have a vote system that enforces a hivemind by itself, on top of a normal moderation system that deletes an enormous amount of content, on top of automated moderation banning posts if you use this or that word, on top of a shadowban system on top of a global content policy system.
The result is that only stuff that the majority of users allow will get displayed.
I used to love the 4chan-style contrarian attitude until, in high school people I knew were killed in Iraq. Then I started to realize that those kinds of nihilist attitudes have real-world consequences. Since then, that attitude has become mainstream (or perhaps just my awareness of it) and following has been a constant trail of death and misery. I can't not take it seriously anymore when my friends and loved ones are dying and turning on each other.
As far as I can tell, 4chan is vehemently against the current neoliberal wars. They laughed their asses off at the US abandoning Afghanistan and are questioning why the NATO has to be in Ukraine at all. Perhaps I misunderstood your tone.
I am not familiar at all with 4chan and its functioning, but if I remember correctly there is no "they" in 4chan, similar to the "Anonymous" group... everyone can go into 4chan, sometimes a radical leftist will go there, next day a radical rightist will post. Is there actually a "cultural leaning" in that site?
If we're assigning blame for nihilism and Iraq, let's not forget that WaPo, NYT, CNN, ABC, FOX and the rest of the pro-war media bear orders of magnitude more responsibility than fucking 4chan.
Oh I fully agree, that's what I mean by that attitude becoming more mainstream. Just growing up I saw that expressed more fully on 4chan before I saw it being adopted elsewhere.
4chan didn't even exist when we invaded Iraq. And the justification for invading Iraq was anything but nihilism, it was a bunch of patriotism and xenophobia wrapped in religious crusade. By the time we invaded we had killed (and acknowledged killing) a million children due to sanctions.
I can't make the connection you make. When people were protesting against the Iraq War, they were told that they didn't believe in anything. I don't understand personal tragedy as an argument against 4chan; everybody you know is going to die eventually, and virtually everybody you're speaking to has known two people who died prematurely and preventably. I, in particular, don't understand people who traveled to kill instead being killed as an argument against humor.
The idea that a 4chan that didn't exist created Judith Miller is bizarre.
I feel like contrarian techniques adopted by sane mind at cooperatively manageable scale (of zero) is great, but IMO users of reactive contrarianism that eventually emerges just deserve downvotes as external means of value judgement. However that leads to communal polarization, and to solve that, regular exposure events would be necessary ... I admire Reddit, at least for its architecture.
iPhone September filled the internet up with people that never had "don't believe a single thing you read there" driven into their skulls. 4chan posting was and is a performance act. The attitude isn't the problem, pretending like context isn't a thing is the problem.
When the internet media and regular media merged one of two things had to happen. Either expose how much of a performance act the old school media was from jump street. Or make the idea of believing everything online at first pass a reasonable position to have.
Q anon grew and continues to exist precisely because it is in the best interests of "respectable" media outlets to not teach media literacy to their consumers.
Off topic, but my tin foil hat theory of r/antiwork is that this a massive psy-op being pushed by some other nation state. Reddits algo easily helps snowball and propagate ideas that are promoted by users within the sub. It is the perfect playbook to destabilize labor markets in a foreign country.
It's possible, but I don't consider it plausible at my current level of understanding.
My null hypothesis is that there are some really loud people on the internet who like to talk loudly about their unpopular ideas. And they're unaware of how deeply unpopular those ideas are until their little corner of the internet suddenly gets mainstream public attention.
So my thinking is the origin story of the sub is definitely organic. However, it is an easy win for a bad actor to push the narrative that a handful of loud voices are shouting about for their own interests.
Perhaps, if you consider, there is genuine feeling of resentment among a large portion of the population trying to survive, and that resentment stems from actual material conditions in the labor market. And a community focused on that could garner actual popularity?
Perhaps "casuals" are simply a product of the content they consume, which is determined by the algorithms of the platforms they consume.
Maybe there's something about Reddit's algorithm and mechanics that predisposes it to low effort neutered meme content. After all, the default Reddit homepage subreddits are all trash (by the way this isn't unique to Reddit, same goes for say Youtube).
This is why we need platforms where users actually own their data, and can customize their own algorithms and UIs (ie. what web3 hopes to solve).
> "My dads a “working class hero” I wanna punch him in the face, we wanted to visit this weekend, we haven’t seen him in 2 months due to covid, we have three kids and so does he (6, 8 and 9) his wife passed away 2 years ago, and he’s been back to work for a year, he is on salary and gets no overtime, what’s he doing right now on this beautiful winter Saturday morning? Fucking working over time... not for money, but because they “need” him... fuck you, your family needs you and you been working 50 h a week on salary for 20 fucking years. Fucken boomers."
When I read this, I see "haven't seen him in two months," "we have three kids and so does he (6, 8 and 9) his wife passed away," and "your family needs you."
When the author read this, he saw "criticizing his father for hard work."
I think we can all agree that the emotional cost to your family is a major, defining symptom of being a workaholic. This appears to be someone seeking support for that, but the author tries to ignore the emotional reality and paper it over with, well, honestly I don't need to rephrase it, I'm sure it's obvious.
Neglecting to spend time with your family can be just as bad as neglecting to provide for them. If it didn't happen so often maybe we wouldn't have so make kids growing up with a deep-set hatred of jobs. You don't need to be Freud to make that association. ;)
I see 50 hours a week as work, nothing more. "Haven't seen him in two months" sounds, in that context, like dramatic hyperbole. Dismissing someone's hard work to support a family with an age-related slur doesn't breed sympathy for a position, either.
I'm pretty sure the issue was more "I'm visiting my dad for the first time in months so my kids can play with their similarly aged uncles, and he's skipping our planned trip to do overtime" that he's reacting to, not the 50 hours a week regularly part.
Although his siblings are being raised by a single dad, so maybe he needs to not work on saturdays?
>I'm pretty sure the issue was more "I'm visiting my dad for the first time in months so my kids can play with their similarly aged uncles, and he's skipping our planned trip to do overtime" that he's reacting to, not the 50 hours a week regularly part.
This is how I read it. And in that context there's a heck of a lot to read between the lines.
Nobody gets their kids out of the house and then starts another family because the first try turned out great.
Sounds like dad doesn't want to spend time with someone. When your options are the middle aged dude putting in OT and raising more kids and the person airing their family drama on the internet who gets the benefit of the doubt isn't much of a choice.
When I read this, I think there is a possibility their dad uses work as an escape from family, as I have known many coworkers over the years who 'hid' at work. It's possible their dad doesn't want to visit them. That is not work's fault, necessarily.
> If it didn't happen so often maybe we wouldn't have so make kids growing up with a deep-set hatred of jobs. You don't need to be Freud to make that association. ;)
These kids need to travel to find out the reality of the world.
What about the dads who are away from their families for weeks or months at a time, working offshore or on military deployments? Are they "bad"? I think some people just have a skewed sense of entitlement.
On the other hand, the argument can be made that the kids' lack of respect for the dad's career might be what's leading to the dad hiding away at work in the first place?
I feel this would be something relatable to a large portion of the people on this site, given how many of us practically live our tech careers. Even if we aren't putting in overtime at work, many of us spend time not at work on personal projects or learning some new tech. We might think of it as different from work, but for an outsider it'll just seem like more work.
It's also a sort of hypocrisy since if the point of the movement is to allow people to be free to do what they find meaning in, surely it's contradictory to diminish what someone finds meaning in just because you don't think it pays enough.
I know that if I had someone who didn't care for how fulfilling tech work is to me, I'd probably end up avoiding them too. Back when I went through a similar phase with my family, I too just buried myself more in work to not have to deal with them. Now they do understand, so I end up spending more time with them.
To be fair if I was the dad I would not want to see this kid either nor anyone else that states they want to punch me in the face. Dad worked for 20 years to provide for his family, lost his wife and keeps providing. Wonder how much of the dad's salary still goes to supporting this 'kid' who has 3 kids of his own. 50 hours a week working is really not that much in the scheme of things, its not optimal but its not really workaholic level.
I can't even grock the writing to get a feeling from it. They have 3 kids and his dad has 3 kids also? Or are their 3 kids the dad's grandchildren and the author of the comment has 2 siblings? And the dad's wife passed away, I assume is not their mother? But why would that be relevant? And since he is a boomer, he is at retirement age probably? His kids must be fully grown right?
> The start of the answer lies in the simple truth of who Doreen Ford was: the person who almost single-handedly built the space, indisputably the single most accurate representative and the one most qualified to understand it.
A community, by definition, cannot be build single-handedly.
Especially a large subreddit, where hundreds of thousands visitors posted stuff, commented, upvoted and publicized the subreddit in other communities.
I think it adds some interesting new context, particularly around denial of origin and proclamation of homogeneity. E. G. It has always meant what I think it means. There is also the connotation of ignorance and post-hoc justification.
Maybe this fits under the umbrella of reformism, but is not synonymous.
"Sanewashing" is the charitable explanation: Someone convincing themselves that the slogan means something sane out of social pressure to conform and adopt a slogan they don't agree with. The less charitable explanation for what's going on is called "gaslighting": The people you're talking with know damn well the slogan means something insane, but they'll lie to you and act condescending and superior in order to convince you to ignore all of the evidence and accept a sane definition.
A while ago I heard an adage about hiring, something like when you hire slow you can teach and grow your existing culture, but when you hire fast the equilibrium flips and the incoming culture is what your company will become.
This is what happened to antiwork. They couldn't disseminate existing ideas and absorb the influx of new culture fast enough, so their culture became the incoming culture, which was approximately that of reddit.
My only question is, prior to the 'my manager sucks' posts and people getting encouraged to stand up for their rights/humanity, what exactly was r/antiwork _doing_? I feel like a majority of users still want to abolish wage slavery without the extreme anarchist association. Demanding better pay and treatment from our employers is an actionable item on the road to that. Besides just not working and living in poverty, I'm not sure what else the plan is.
If a group has to choose between an idealized echo chamber of non-action and a washed-out version of the same thing but with real change in peoples' lives, I would take the latter.
It's important to understand that there is a separate movement with some overlap in users called r/WorkReform that is the more "hey, let's fix shitty employment problems" while AntiWork is supposed to be a far anarchist position.
Of course, having a position does not make a plan tenable.
The mods had made this explicit: they are anti-Capitalist, and that is their mission. The unironic tolerance for Socialism/Communism in popular discussion is disturbing. EDIT: read the faq if you don't want to believe me, it's all there.
Communism isn't really about "free shit", though. The slogan is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" -- not that you get to sit on your butt and somehow everything still works out. You're still very much expected to work, in fact if you have any ability it's probably illegal for you not to.
Now whether communism actually works or not is another matter, but I don't really see where you get the "free shit" angle.
You know, for all this shitting on extremist anti-work anarcho communists, I find that their ideological consistency makes them quite tolerable even if I think their ideas would be laughably useless when taken to the extremes they advocate for.
Contrast that with the (to use TFA's terminology) "gentrifiers" who blow like ideological tumbleweeds and hold beliefs simply based on whether those beliefs are advantageous to hold (Stalin would be proud).
Principled extremists can be reasoned with. Compromises can be made. Progress can happen. Unprincipled faux-extremists are like herding cats. You give them one thing and they show up the next day bitching that you gave them the wrong thing. I know who I'd rather deal with.
>Principled extremists can be reasoned with. Compromises can be made.
I think you've defined that they don't make compromises when you called them principled extremists. ;) But I do agree that they have advantages over opportunists who don't believe anything: sometimes an extremist will have discovered a nugget of truth that you can take out from the rest, while an opportunist only believes things that are wholly circumstantial and unlikely to help you.
I think this article is trying to have its cake and eat it too. If the sub has been sanewashed and overrun by average left-of-center opinions and become wildly popular, then how can it be true that Doreen still represents the movement? The movement changed, as the article points out, and therefore Doreen was a terrible choice of representative. The fact that she predates the change is exactly the reason she is not representative. Instead the article tries to argue opposite. I have to admit that the author appears to be doing everything possible to make me assume this is due to their partisan bias as hardly a sentence goes by without a verbal jab.
> then how can it be true that Doreen still represents the movement
Represents the "movement", or represents the sub? They obviously still represented the sub - they were there when it got created, were a moderator, were picked by other moderators to be a representative of the subreddit in media events (which is conflated with the nebulous concept of "the movement")
The issue here is that the "movement" may not be represented by Doreen, but there may not even be a movement outside of the sub, and they do represent the sub. A lot of people treat "the movement" and "the sub" as basically being equivalent. They may actually be equivalent. If the sub shut down, there isn't really any guarantee that the same kind of antiwork internet discourse would be as loud, focused and frequent as it is right at this moment.
You could ask the same about Fox - which is hardly ground zero for sanity itself.
Does it represent a movement, or a TV channel?
If it's a movement, by what process was it elected?
Point being I doubt anyone at Fox was unhappy with how the Doreen interview turned out.
Did they ask to interview anyone else from the sub?
All this really does is highlight the difference between online opinionation - always easy - and effective activism. The latter is much harder and absolutely needs informed - ideally effective and professional - handling of public presentation and messaging.
Yes activism is hard, which is one of the reasons why social media gave rise to slacktivism instead. It's a low effort gratification that is reinforced by ones social network.
It's one of the issues with subreddits as they get larger. Low effort "look how great I am for standing up to my boss" posts win the day.
> Point being I doubt anyone at Fox was unhappy with how the Doreen interview turned out.
Yeah, and what else could you expect from Jessie Waters? He's a smug propagandist, and people like Doreen Ford are perfect for his message. It's pretty stupid to cooperate with him unless you 1) agree with him, or 2) have good reason to believe you're up to effectively representing yourself to a hostile audience through a sleazy host, all of whom are more interested in mocking you than listening to you. And frankly, if they ask you for an interview, it that's probably good reason to believe #2 is false.
Fox is a selective amplifier like most news media. They pick topics that make their beliefs look good and much more importantly topics that make their enemies look terrible (see the antiwork interview)
And on more than one occasion, I've seen them pick interviewees who seem completely unqualified to speak on a topic. For example, I once saw an advocate for free universal college interviewed. It was some idealistic college student still going for their undergrad talking about how it's what "everyone deserves" and would "make the world a better place". The interview was a brutal public lashing. Regardless of where you stand on the topic of free universal college, I think we can all agree that it makes sense to speak to an expert on the topic, not someone in their late teens still trying to find their footing in this crazy world. That interview was uninformative and just plain cruel.
Representation is really at the heart of it. What the article left out was that Doreen was asked by mods and by the community(by poll) not to participate in the interview. She did it anyway.
The broader social epistemic question of "what makes someone a representative?" or "How do people gain the social status: representative?" is the most interesting part of this. Reddit itself plays a role in the construction of representative status by visually framing mods in the sidebar under the subreddit rules section leading people to mentally label both as the rules and rule-makers of the space. There are examples of mods in other subreddits also being representatives, making it natural to apply that syllogistically and generally to all Reddit communities.
If a mod created the sub, and actively participates, but is disavowed as a representative, are they still a representative? Would this have changed if the interview had gone well? How does representation work when communities disagree? Antiwork members don't see Doreen as a representative, but individuals outside of antiwork do. Does that make her a representative or not? It's fascinating that what is obvious to one person is a tremendous number of questions to another.
>If a mod created the sub, and actively participates, but is disavowed as a representative, are they still a representative?
by reddit's rules, yes. You have to be fundamentally destroying a decently large and active sub before the admins step in and kick out a mod. But the number of times this has happened in 15 years can be counted on one hand.
Otherwise, admins don't care about what mods do with their subs. seniority first, most senior mods ultimately has the power to kick out everyone else and ban every user if they wish. And that's why these kinds of "movements" are doomed to fail under reddit's structure.
This is the key, I think. It's possible for an individual to start or grow a movement. It is impossible for an individual to own or control a movement, at least for long, because that's not what a movement is. The movement will eventually either die (which might happen) or escape control (which might also happen).
The phenomenon of a movement's founders going on to reject what the movement has become (or maybe has always been) is pretty common. If I take the article's claims at face value, this is just the inverse of that. The movement became something that rejected its founder.
Where did the author say Doreen Ford was still representative of the current user base? It was pretty explicit that she represented its original form, not what it had become. The whole takeaway for me anyways was the shifting nature of group ideals and membership. One person or founder may represent the typical ideals of the original group, while later they may be wildly unrepresentative due to an influx of more “moderate” members. Again this was a pretty clear takeaway.
As someone completely detached and not a part of this “antiwork” movement in any way, your post reads to me like someone who joined the community in its later stages and are bristling at what you think is a takedown that is trying to misrepresent your “totally normal, reasonable views of advocating for better working conditions”. And maybe the replacement of anarcho-communists with people advocating better working condition is a good thing! The tragedy is that the current, moderate ideals are mismatched with the original, extremist group name and ideals. Thus the need for “sane-washing” like so—
New member: “Actually anti-work isn’t about not working, it’s really about improving working conditions.”
Original anti-work founder: “No we literally are anti-work and want to abolish work.”
New member: “Nooooo you don’t represent us!!”
Like that is the exact process described. Same dynamic if you s/antiwork/abolish the police/
Author of the article here. The user above you is correct. My claim that Ford is indisputably the best representative of the space has nothing to do with its current user base and everything to do with its history. The user base shifted, but I don’t hold that a place’s present is so extricable from its past that 7 years of history become irrelevant when the space grows.
Then it's odd to call her the "single most accurate representative" then if you agree that Doreen is not representative of the users or the movement anymore. The historical information about the sub was well-researched and interesting, though.
Once you eat the cake, you can no longer possess it
EDIT:
Let me make it more clear, as English may not be your first language, if you're asking this question in truth (I sometimes miss sarcasm online, sorry).
Cakes can be beautiful things which people (of a certain time period, especially) wanted to show off as a sign of their wealth, as refined sugar was expensive. Once it was eaten, you could no longer display such wasteful extravagance.
| i hate how americans always assume we are from there and understand everything they say |
It's a forum where everyone was typing in English, so my first assumption was that English was your fist language. I didn't say anything about American. And I tried to fix my mistake =/
There's a similar idiom in a couple different languages. The French supposedly say 'avoir le beurre et l’argent du beurre' (have the butter and the money from [selling] the butter), and I once recalled hearing that there was a Spanish idiom along the lines of having a chicken in both the pot and in the yard, but alas I'm not able to find that phrase.
If you subscribe to a subreddit literally called antiwork that clearly states its ideology in its sidebar, you shouldn't be surprised by Doreen celebrating laziness as a virtue. Just like with politicians, just because your representative is a disliked doesn't mean that they aren't your legitimate one.
If you see the interview with Doreen, it seems like she is actually in favour of what the author refers to as the new movement. What stands out to me is that she says that the movement is to reduce the work that people are forced to do, that they still want to put in effort and labour but not in a position where they feel trapped. This seems to contrast what the author says was the original purpose of the subreddit; to abolish work.
Subreddit's changing their spots isn't uncommon, it's the norm for reddit.
The author has a very clear agenda here, and while they're welcome to construct a case for that view, they've left out inconvenient details while attempting to appear neutral.
The core issue is that the subreddit already had an agreement that no one would attempt to represent the movement or do interviews. The forethought there was that a reddit mod (or similar) are unlikely to be sufficiently prepared to act as a spokesperson for a politically sensitive movement. Doreen's actions were entirely self-serving and the subreddit was absolutely right to make a stand, especially as Doreen did not represent the community or its views - as given by the enormous backlash.
It's deeply disingenuous to suggest that the work reform principles of the subreddit are moot because a mod started the original subreddit as a protest against work.
> It's deeply disingenuous to suggest that the work reform principles of the subreddit are moot because a mod started the original subreddit as a protest against work.
This point might stand better using a word other than "principle," from principium (beginning), from princeps (initiator).
Anarchists are going to have a hard time accepting this, but I think the lesson here is that you can't have a coherent community focused on its original subject without quite a lot of gatekeeping.
On Reddit, r/AskHistorians has a good approach. The blogging model (as revived by Substack) also seems to work.
These are explicitly non-democratic. AskHistorians gives historians higher status. A blog is about whatever the blog author wants it to be about.
Hacker News has good moderation but it's a lot more anti-tech than it used to be and that's a reflection of the broader culture. If they really wanted to resist that then it would require stronger moderation at the expense of growth.
The whole subreddit went off the rails the moment they allowed misinformation and fake stories to be kept on the front page.
The stories I was reading must have been written by teenagers, nobody in leadership does or says half the things on that sub.
One post today was saying how their manager was planning to fire them 6 months from now... NO manager does that, *ever*. If someone is not meeting expectations termination is at most 2 months away, in America anyway. Anyone who is surprised by their termination due to performance really is not paying attention. Only a person with no professional experience would make these stories up.
>Anyone who is surprised by their termination due to performance really is not paying attention
I have definitely seen cases where someone was obviously really struggling with the quality of their work; i.e. others having to massively go through rounds of reworking their output to the point that they had negative productivity. Yet when they were eventually let go, they were shocked and surprised. Some people have pretty low awareness.
I think this setup illustrated ridiculousness of both sides.
You confront authentic (troubled) person doing what she wants with another human so meticulously styled, plucked, tanned and dressed at corporate expense, walking at extremely shot leash with every one of his words tightly controlled, with all the scripted emotions. He looks as if he was a voice box made of plastic.
With this contrast you see how bad the work is, even if antiwork is not perfect either at the moment.
You usually watch news as if it was normal. You look at news anchors as if they were people, not corporate half-robots. Only such contrast gives you a chance to see them for what they are.
You usually watch news as if it was normal. You look at news anchors as if they were people, not corporate half-robots. Only such contrast gives you a chance to see them for what they are.
I haven't been able to watch the news in about 20 years. Pro wrestlers are more sincere than most news anchors
imagine a world where we could tune in to neutrally-moderated longform debate on policy instead of points-scoring five-minute sandwiched-by-advertising talking heads talking through a scripted (at least by the host, if not both parties) sequence of talking points and slogans. instead this is the world we get, the world we're told to accept, the world where people like my dad can watch a night's worth of "news" from each of the major cable networks and think that that's an actually balanced, nuanced information diet. the whole thing cannot implode soon enough.
> imagine a world where we could tune in to neutrally-moderated longform debate on policy
We had something of that world. Firing Line was on air for thirty years, and many other countries had or have comparable programmes.
It's been a long de-evolution, not a radical destruction. Every innovation in media communication was that little bit faster, that little bit more palatable, but it's a one-way street, and hard to reverse.
My mother (born 1951) can't enjoy any film made after 2000, they're too frantic and they stress her. My ex-girlfriend (born 1996) couldn't enjoy any film made before 1990, they were too slow and they bored her to sleep. I have to put effort into reading books rather than relatively short essays nowadays.
I don't think there can be an implosion, at this point. We need a future generation, sometime after Z, that will grow up thinking that ten-second TikTok videos are the peak of uncool and something only old stodgy zoomers can enjoy.
Actually most revolutionary and astute observations about state of affairs recently came to me through tiktok. I wouldn't encounter them even if I watched network news 24/7
This reminds me of "Defund the Police", wherein supporters would try to convince others that the slogan did not literally mean what it says.
Like AntiWork, It seems to have been started by those who genuinely wanted to abolish the police. But as time went on people joined who instead wanted to reform the police by dramatically cutting back what they were meant to respond to. But the slogan stayed, and was very misleading and puzzling to most people.
"Defund" can be a relative term that doesn't necessarily mean to fully remove funding. E.g. we've had decades of hyperbole where relatively small cuts to defense funding are referred to by opponents as "defunding" US troops.
We spend a whole lot on policing compared to most other developed nations, and we're not getting terrific outcomes either on civil liberties or crime rates. It might be time to take a different approach where we spend a lot less on direct policing, and redeploy a lot of those resources to fight crime in other ways.
The developed countries that spend more or similar amounts tend to do it by spending on more highly trained officers than we do.
On the other hand, maybe we're just so socioculturally fucked that it requires massive authoritarian investment to keep a crummy level of peace. I'm undecided.
> On the other hand, maybe we're just so socioculturally fucked that it requires massive authoritarian investment to keep a crummy level of peace. I'm undecided.
If you spend a huge amount of money on police, and get bad outcomes for both crime rate and negative impacts of policing, there's really two options:
- The money is poorly spent, and better (perhaps less) spending would obtain better outcomes
- Because of other factors, we're doing approximately as well as we can: if we deployed resources away from the authoritarian, heavy-handed mechanisms, we'd have even more crimes and bad outcomes.
I think the former is more likely, but I can't entirely exclude the latter.
There are a number of socioeconomic factors that are believed to be the underlying influence on violent crime. My own personal summary on this is that people tend to become criminals when they lose hope in having a fair shot at a successful life, or see an opportunity that they don't find morally reprehensible ("well, it's really the bank/insurance money so it's not hurting a person"). So I think this hopelessness is mostly what drove the pandemic crime increase.
> On the other hand, maybe we're just so socioculturally fucked that it requires massive authoritarian investment to keep a crummy level of peace. I'm undecided.
I think people both understate how splintered the US society really is, and overstate the importance of this divide.
Imagine a country with a HUGE historical and current influx of immigrants that bring tons of different cultures and ideologies into the mix. The country has traditionally been hard to govern, especially at the federal level, precisely because it encourages freedom of thought and expression through both law and immigration policy. Its economic structure further encourages division by being one of the most meritocratic systems on the planet, where material gains for good decisions are quite the norm, but where the divide between the haves and have nots is always growing, and always on display.
In a country I describe, why is it any surprise to anyone that criminal behavior will be more common than in a more cohesive environment, therefore necessitating a more strict policing approach? And in what world does it make sense to reduce police powers in such a country without suffering the obvious increase in crime that will follow that?
It's not that US is fundamentally broken or fucked up, it's just a very different place compared to the "liberal utopias" of Northern Europe, so often cited by leftist activists in the states.
Correct, but that's just how the country is. If people want cultural changes, they've gotta address the causes of the divides in the US and understand that they'll have massive negative consequences too, not just positive ones.
Or they can move to a country that is already more in line with what they want out of society.
I think it was always pretty clear that the movement as a whole advocated redistribution of resources toward less violent and more efficient alternatives to police, like better social programs and mental health resources.
Relying on the police to prevent crime is like relying on firefighters to prevent fires or paramedics to prevent injuries. Sure they have a role to play, but logically they should only be the last resort in case everything else goes wrong.
From my own experience, and the discussions I had with my peers, the specific term "defund" does not imply advocating redistribution. I sense that in the vernacular "defund" means to stop paying for something and the implication is you are getting rid of whatever is no longer being funded. Defund also tends to be used for line-items and programs rather than organizations and departments, which adds to the confusion.
But the key difference is that you said "fund NASA", rather than "defund NASA". Fund definitely implies there is not currently enough money, or that a new program is being advocated for.
I would likewise think that anyone who wanted to "defund NASA" had the intention of getting rid of the agency, rather than a more nuanced position of "we should stop funding SLS so that we can reallocate the money on high school STEM outreach and climate satellites."
Defund is the opposite of fund. If fund doesn't imply that they had no money at all, defund shouldnt imply removing all their money. If the intention was to get rid of NASA, then the phrase would be "abolish NASA", "dismantle NASA", or some other word that actually has that meaning.
I'm talking about the word "defund" in the vernacular. Which, for many people, absolutely does also imply abolish or eliminate.
As a thought experiment, I'm going to conjure a slogan: "Defund the Humane Society".
What is the first thing that comes to mind? I expect most people would think "you want to get rid of the animal shelter?" And I would reply, "no what I actually want is to re-allocate money from the euthanasia program so that we can have increased adoption rates and make this a no-kill shelter."
Putting aside the vernacular implications of "defund", my slogan is totally ineffective at actually capturing what I am trying to accomplish. And, it has the added downside of giving people a terrible and inaccurate first impression.
When a criminal is arrested their future crimes are prevented.
I think there’s an assumption that crime is random and that people randomly commit them. In that case it doesn’t matter if you arrest because what’s the point, it’s random.
But people usually commit crimes intentionally. And they commit multiple crimes.
Fire is different than crime in that it’s not conscious.
I don’t think police are alone in preventing crime but they aren’t a last resort. I also think we spend too much on police. And we spend on the wrong things. I want to reform the police to make them more effective.
I’m thinking the latter as it seems so crazy to use a specific word and then argue against its understood meaning. Why would I want to bother with that confusion when I could just call it “reform police” or whatever.
Gaslighting is very mainstream and seems so commonplace in even banal, insubstantial things like debating whether “defund police” means to remove funding from the police or something else.
If someone advocates for more funding for social workers and mental health care, they can just say so. That funding doesn't necessarily need to come from police budgets.
If someone advocates to "defund Planned Parenthood", they would be disappointed with a mere reduction in funding.
I think the article articulates the counterpoint. Most movements start with radicals. A milder slogan wouldn't have gotten traction with the radicals, who actually do want to abolish the police. If the radicals weren't protesting, the mainstream wouldn't have taken notice and come on board. This leads to a conflict of views within the protesters and ultimately the revision of the slogan definition
You could say literally the same thing about any political slogan. For example, please explain "government accountability" or "serve the people"? That literally could be anything. Another example, "Medicare for All", pretty straight forward, but what does it look like as a policy?
Or "Make American Great Again" or "Build Back Better". Any slogan can be questioned. IMO, "Defund the Police" is almost the most straightforward political slogan I can think of and if you Google it, near the top result is a website explaining exactly what it means.
The problem with a lot of people who were questioning "Defund the Police" in my experience is that they would go to BLM protests but then be much more moderate and not actually interested in what the protests meant or what defunding the police actually means; the slogan wasn't unclear, it was wanting to look like you cared but not actually doing the work to convince yourself or learn more.
I think this is a really good example of an effective slogan, both in Reagan's initial use and later Trump's. It has some really critical properties: it's easy to comprehend, while also nimble enough to fit anyone's notions, and you can't argue against it directly.
If you have to direct people to "Google it," then your slogan is a non-starter. I'm not a marketing expert (hence the rather dry alternatives), but I am aware of how wildly effective conservative-leaning messaging is compared to the often off-putting (even if well-intentioned) liberal-messaging on the other side. So then, why not use the same tactics? Government accountability is a good thing, and you really can't argue against it. If it makes sense to demand a lot of accountability at a high standard from teachers (and teacher unions), then the very same demands should be put on police (and police unions). Use the same exact messaging.
My point about "Make America Great Again" is anyone can be like "I don't get it what does it mean though?" which happened a lot from liberals and left for this slogan specifically. Conservatives get the benefit of being easily aligned around their leaders and values, so sure "Make America Great Again" works really well in that context where everyone wants pretty much the same thing.
"Defund the Police" had a specific meaning which was to actually defund the police but, as with any actual implementation, when you get to the specifics people have a lot of different views and opinions. I don't think you combat that by making a better slogan, I think you just deal with it. The handwringing over what "Defund the Police" means was a huge distraction IMO and mostly bad actors who disagreed with the premise fundamentally and weren't looking for real ways to implement policies.
> If it makes sense to demand a lot of accountability at a high standard from teachers (and teacher unions), then the very same demands should be put on police (and police unions). Use the same exact messaging.
Okay, what's the exact, unquestionable slogan you would use here? Good luck.
>My point about "Make America Great Again" is anyone can be like "I don't get it what does it mean though?" which happened a lot from liberals and left for this slogan specifically. Conservatives get the benefit of being easily aligned around their leaders and values, so sure "Make America Great Again" works really well in that context where everyone wants pretty much the same thing.
I absolutely agree with you here, and this is the point I'm trying to emphasize. Slogans have to be aspirational and adaptable and unassailable. "MAGA" is all three. "Defund the police" is really only aspirational and sort-of-adaptable. Its weakness is that it's easy to oppose it and look like you have the moral high ground (i.e., being a crime-fighter). You can't attack "MAGA" directly without sounding like you hate America. That's the brilliance of it.
>"Defund the Police" had a specific meaning which was to actually defund the police but, as with any actual implementation, when you get to the specifics people have a lot of different views and opinions. I don't think you combat that by making a better slogan, I think you just deal with it. The handwringing over what "Defund the Police" means was a huge distraction IMO and mostly bad actors who disagreed with the premise fundamentally and weren't looking for real ways to implement policies.
This is where we disagree. The policy specifics don't matter. Not at the slogan/rallying level. "Defund the police" has a pretty clear policy roadmap, even if it could take on varying shades. "MAGA" is completely devoid of policy, and that's what makes it such a strong talking point. Anyone can attach whatever aspiration they want to it without getting mired up in boring details. This results in widespread acceptance.
>Okay, what's the exact, unquestionable slogan you would use here? Good luck.
I never claimed to have the correct answer here. All I'm doing is pointing out how horrifically bad "defund the police" is and offering field-tested examples of slogans that are so much better at inspiring action, for better or worse (e.g., MAGA). Something closer to a jazzed-up version of "government accountability" or "police competence" would have all the desirable properties of "MAGA" that I've described: aspirational and adaptable and unassailable. "Defund the police" ain't it.
Given the long history of the US culture broadly being anti-left, what possible slogan could there be that's "aspirational and adaptable and unassailable". I think you put effort into a slogan but it's pretty much impossible for any leftist slogan to meet those criteria.
And anyways, again, I highly disagree that any slogan is unassailable. A lot of people still attacked "MAGA" so where is the line that you measure "unassailablity"? I could say to someone against "Defund the Police" that you hate Black people but there just isn't widespread support for that opinion like there is with being anti american. "Defund the Police" is a compromise slogan, "Abolish the Police" is the more radical version and arguably even clearer and less assailable but again mainstream US culture just doesn't want to face that reality.
Also, adaptable slogans are great for campaigns (where you probably don't want to assign policy specifics) and conservatives (who largely agree on everything already) but not for positions that are supposed to end up with policy changes. What adaptable slogan is there for leftist movement that's asking specifically to tackle the issue of police violence? The problem with adaptable slogans is they become compromised or co-opted. "Black Lives Matter" became a the conservative rally "All Lives Matter" and "Blue Lives Matter". Can this be avoided on the left by a more adaptable slogan? I doubt it.
So, okay maybe there's some slightly better slogan than "Defund the Police" but at the end of the day it's not the slogan that's the issue, it's liberals that don't actually agree with the basic idea but want to pretend they're still pro-left or whatever.
Edit: to complete the thought, all of this is to say, all the disagreement with the slogan is overall to a bad faith, pointless end. If the media and liberals and whoever are spending a bunch of time arguing about the slogan, it's time that could have been spent discussing and negotiating policy specifics. But liberals and mainstream media didn't want to do that. So we ended up with a lot of arguing about a slogan and not much actual policy and the police won.
A far better slogan would have been "Demilitarize the Police". I do not know why so many people who want police reform want to stick to "Defund the Police" when it comes with so much baggage.
That's a good one. Maybe even demanding "competent police" would be a good aggressive tack. If there's footage of police killing unarmed people in their homes or in broad daylight, then we should absolutely demand more competence and professionalism from them. That puts police unions in a tough spot of not being able to argue against that.
But that's not what the movement is about. The "Defund the Police" and "Abolish the Police" slogans are based on even "better policing", "community policing", etc. still being incredibly harmful to communities.
> If there's footage of police killing unarmed people in their homes or in broad daylight, then we should absolutely demand more competence and professionalism from them
This happened so much. Did you see all the videos of police violence during BLM and before and after? I don't think the problem is the slogan.
These terrible slogans are the product of social media. A good slogan is only going to get juice from one side. A slogan that is supremely dunkable by one side yet scratches the itch on the other is going to surface like curds in spoiled milk.
What slogan have you heard is "A slogan that is supremely dunkable by one side yet scratches the itch on the other is going to surface like curds in spoiled milk". No slogan is going to be 100% perfect because it's compressing an enormous amount of political opinion and legal implementation into a few words. IMO "Defund the Police" worked because it got a lot of people talking. The detractors were bad actors and not actually interested in implementation.
Only because opponents of it deliberately misinterpreted it.
Defund the police means defunding the police. Over half of all city taxes go to funding the police forces, who do little to no good for the community with the money they're given. Buying more tanks and assault weapons and fancy cars and employing people who live in big macmansions in the suburbs isn't helping us.
Concervatives act like the word "defund" means the same as "abolish" when talking about the police, but then are happy to talk about defunding education, or defunding planned parenthood, or defunding medicare, defunding social security, defunding sanctuary cities, etc fully expecting their base to understand that they don't mean "abolish".
Conservatives do mean abolish for those things, though.
They want to abolish sanctuary cities, abolish planned parenthood, abolish medicare, abolish social security and abolish state-run education standards.
Moderates don't want to abolish most of those things, but hardcore conservatives completely do.
Well, not really. While it isn't necessarily a mainstream view, many people do believe that the police in the United States function an unaccountable armed militia/gang, killing at will, and paid for by the public. Hence, the view that the public should defund the police.
Another facet of the same view is that the police are assumed to be inherently so far gone and corrupt that reform is not possible, and to assume that it is is futile.
Actually defund the police means exactly what it says. The proposal is that police budgets get diverted to mental health and rehabilitation programs.
The budget moved to mental health & rehab would be handled under a different agency than the police, which is something that is constantly argued over. Many opponents of defund the police agree with the overall budget reallocation, but they believe the budget should not change agencies.
What opponents need to understand about the movement is that police would have less to do, as many emergency calls would be handled by actual professionals. So if they still need their mini tanks, assault weapons, and SWAT gear, they can still make a case based on their newly lightened responsibilities.
A lot of the mini-tanks, assault weapons and SWAT gear is based on how the police are funded, not necessarily the amount of funding they have.
The amount of funding a police department has is determined at the beginning of the fiscal year and by how much was spent by the previous year, including any shortfalls or excesses in budgetary spending. City councils and Mayors/DA's are always looking to trim the police budget (believe it or not), so a lot of the time, the department will take any excess budget they have at the end of the year and spend it on military auction items (a whole other mess), in order to keep their budget and show that they've been able to stretch their budget as far as they can and get the most value for their dollar (I read a very good article about it like 2 years ago, or so and can't find it). But departments do this so they don't lose their future budgets, "just in case" they need to hire future officers, need more "real" equipment, etc. etc.
This has lead to the increase in militarization of the police and the militarization of the tactics of the police as military personnel are already familiar with the equipment. There has been no same said impetus to increase nonviolent intervention tactics on an ever increasingly divisive nation, who's "news" cycle and social networks actively work to stoke division and tension as it feeds interaction, which provides more eyes on advertisement (sorry, I went down a rabbithole in the end, there).
It would be better, well it would be a start, to have quarterly budget reviews and performance reviews tied to the needs of the community and training. But, we all know that isn't how politics works =(
> Actually defund the police means exactly what it says.
…to you. Not everyone agrees and the simple fact that this discussion is taking place and you are defending this slogan would seem to render this purported clarity moot.
Most of the confusion is semantic in nature. Whether defund means remove all funding or just some funding.
I think some radicals wanted to remove all funding, and radicals on the other side latched onto that and spread that as if it were the truth.
Defund the police has mostly been about reallocating budgets between agencies. There are, however, a few specific branches of police that protestors have want shut down, but not to remove policing entirely.
Here in Canada, many of those same voices are now begging the Ottawa police to take on a _more_ violent and confrontational approach in response to the ongoing protest. The hypocrisy is absolutely surreal to me.
Is it really surprising that all kinds of different people are a part of a political movement? You would find this same kind of diversity of thought in any group of people.
No that's definitely true, I should have been more specific. In my case, I was referring to some past acquaintances who are very vocal about their views on social media.
Specifically, the perspective I'm bothered by, is that of being pro-police intervention when it's for a cause you don't support, but calling to defund the police when they're disrupting a protest you _do_ support.
I'm sure you could find some folks in the world who would support that for any protest, but most just want the Ottawan ones to stop honking, stop blocking, stop whining, achieve their political ends via democratic means, vs. by force, and suck it up when they're unable to convince enough people to subscribe to their newsletter.
I think in both of these cases, and in the case of the Cap Hill Autonomous Zone (No we mean Cap Hill Occupied Protest actually!) the shift in rhetoric is not so much from the new people joining, but from the movement getting a reality check and embarrassing itself, then scaling back its ambitions.
Edit: The analogue on the right (but not as clean I guess) would be the attempt to reframe the Jan 6 protests after that utter "embarrassment." They wanted to overturn the election but now the right is spinning hard to reframe the rhetoric. Basically your radicals work hard building a groundswell and excitement around some idea, eventually embarrass themselves, and you have to do damage control. That's modern day national politics.
At face value, many police departments do seem overfunded. In many small towns you'll see too many patrol cars for the area, new patrol cars too often, unnecessary improvements to the department, etc. while other areas of the budget languish because it's politically unpopular to go against the police department and people fear retaliation for advocating against them.
I think if you asked 100 people what it meant at its heyday maybe 70-80 would say "abolish the police." Connotation of words and all that. Just for humor's sake, google dictionary definition of defund is "prevent from continuing to receive funds" thus kill/abolish.
And those same people would happily call for legislation to defund sanctuary cities, defund education, defund planned parenthood, defund medicaid, with the full understanding that the proposals aren't intended to wipe those things from the face of the earth.
I mean, do you want to build a winning coalition or do you want to keep sending out confusing political messages and complain amongst yourselves about how the game just isn't fair?
I disagree as the “defund planned parenthood” want to kill the whole org. I mean, that’s why it’s a dangerous proposal as planned parenthood performs many positive functions. So defunding them would harm more than just the part people dislike.
No, I don't think it actually did. It was created by prison abolitionists, who believe in abolishing prison as a whole, an end to punitive jailing and moving to restorative justice with a community problem-solving system, like that advocated by Danielle Sered.
Yeah, this word "sanewashing" as popularized by the article -- while I have mixed feelings about portmanteaus -- is going to be really useful. It's a word I didn't know I needed until I saw it.
Better representation of anti-work- and its crime- having the hacker mentality and the audacity to execute a similar move to investors/big players without the funds.
Very few in our society are still needed to work, many who work do more harm then good (to the environment & themselves) and most of the work done today, exists to massage the egos of power-animals who can not avoid a existential crisis without a pyramid of suffering beneath them.
Remote work has revealed how obsolete that caste and its longings are.
Its also has shown that work is partially used to keep the "uneducated" masses from going haywire with conspiracy theories. (6 Jan comes to mind)
Which is a psychological problem worth of solving, but not one that is actually a decent enough argument to protect this institution of self-flagellation without any reward, except continued existence in protestant-work-ethic-purgatory.
I liked the factual analysis and the story of /r/antiwork.
But regarding the actual topic of work I think it sets up a false dichotomy; that one is either a sane normal person who thinks productivity is good, or an out-of-touch anarcho-communist.
There is actually a very large middle ground which represents the most balanced view towards work; that most work is a necessary evil. It's not that work is good or desirable, it's that it (both individually and as a society) is necessary for survival or to maintain a certain standard of living.
If technology and automation could allow those who wanted to have only a 10-hour work week, with the same lifestyle, that would be unequivocally a good thing.
I'm not an anarchist, but in this sense I am very much anti-work.
There's a saying something like "people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses" that can be extrapolated a bit. Work can be very positive and rewarding, or it can be negative and abusive. Everyone's experience is different; sometimes I feel that the fact r/antiwork has attained such saliency is maybe a sign that there's too much of the latter experience and not enough of the former.
I disagree with this, at least as a blanket statement. Plenty of workplaces are a deeply negative factor in people's lives.
If what you're saying is really more along the lines of "having a project and way to spend the time is a net positive", then I completely agree, but I don't think that has to be tightly coupled to work (as in employment) per se.
Those problems have nothing to do with the nature of work. Bad management, low pay and too many hours have no bearing on the importance of work.
It allows you to contribute to society and get social validation. "Personal projects" typically do neither (if they did, they would be lucrative). Even the boring stuff can be meditative. Provided the conditions are adequate, work is good for people and society at large.
What is "sanewashing"? English is not my native language and I am having genuine trouble locating the definitions. The top 1 result in google is this very linked article.
It's a word the author made up. It means, "taking a movement that was originally crazy and attempting to rehabilitate its image by downplaying its origins."
I am not sure how useful this idea is as a concept. The Libertarian party had a similar history (its original platform had something to do with keeping leaded gasoline legal...) but it doesn't matter now.
Read the article, it's explained. The term was coined in r/neoliberal, https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/js84tu/how_did_.... The poster there asks the question, what to do when you want to hold a position but you encounter good arguments against it? And then answers it:
> I’m arguing you’re going to “sanewash” it. And by that I mean, what you do is go “Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]”.
For what it's worth, English is my native language and I was unfamiliar with the term. I couldn't figure out the definition without more context either.
It is internet lingo and I would not recommend using it contexts other than describing internet events/drama. Even in that context, I personally would only use it carefully while quoting someone else. It does not create productive conversations as it automatically casts the opposite party as "insane".
In this article the point about mainstream views infiltrating this place where oddballs formerly found sanctuary and a sense of belonging really stuck with me.
I wonder how many of these 4chan like places exist under the radar just waiting for a Google algorithm tweak or a viral meme to go big and destroy their formerly tolerant communities.
565 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadSanewashing is a recuperation of recuperation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
I personally saw r/antiwork as another incarnation of OWS. Only difference is that it was online ( so perception only ) and antiwork was very effectively destroyed via character assassination. I am sure it will be studied in terms of PR engagement and social manipulation.
Guy went on Fox news (against the communities) wishes and made millions of people's first impression of r/AntiWork to be negative.
In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform.
Most of the sub (I'd wager >80%) are Americans asking for workers rights that are the norm in western Europe. Things like paid maternal/paternal leave, greater work life balance and paid overtime, flexibly working and WFH.
The majority of people in America are almost certainly in favour of that, but you get a dog walker going on TV on a notoriously provocative network talking about "anti-work" it's just mind boggling.
That was the biggest thing in my opinion. AntiWork was too open to the type of people who don't care about workers' rights and were just there because they think the world owes them a living. NEETs are horrible for the cause of labor reform.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEET
> In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform.
/r/WorkReform exists already.
> Most of the sub (I'd wager >80%) are Americans asking for workers rights that are the norm in western Europe. Things like paid maternal/paternal leave, greater work life balance and paid overtime, flexibly working and WFH.
This is the author's point, that before /r/antiwork realigned itself, their moderator was actually representative of the average /r/antiwork user, that through an influx of left-aligned users, it got "sanewashed". These new users were ashamed of being associated with the original mod, but that mod is still very much the one that was dicussing legitimate /r/antiwork ideas before we ever heard of their fringe community.
Maybe it should be against the rules to say you know it's against the rules, and so on recursively. This loophole is often exploited to make these remarks equally useless and extra snarky.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
My comment sole focus is not that parent didn't read the article. Instead, I chose to answer the comment's question with the answers from the article.
> Useless and extra snarky.
Making a top comment based on an article headline, with no knowledge of what is actually discussed is what's useless and against the HN discussion spirit where we usually try to foster meaningful conversations.
> It's against the rule to say that you did not read the article, so I won't say it, but:
>> In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform.
> /r/WorkReform exists already.
Could have been shortened to
>> In the modern world optics are EVERYTHING and that cannot be understated. Imho the first thing they need to change (which they have with their move to the new subreddit) is renaming it from r/AntiWork to r/WorkReform.
> /r/WorkReform exists already.
And it would have been better.
> /r/WorkReform exists already.
Yes, they noted that
No, I don't think this is accurate. They wanted to abolish work for everyone, not for a select few.
They use a specific definition of work, so they maybe aren't necessarily anti-work in the way you are thinking.
What I don't understand is why many see it as acceptable for any business to pay less than a living wage under any circumstance, it's just a roundabout way of making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force
that's because remuneration isn't based on value, it's based on market conditions. value merely provides an upper bound. as an extreme example, clean water provides near infinite value to you (you need water to survive, so you're willing to pay infinite dollars for it), yet you can get it from your tap at less than a penny per gallon.
>What I don't understand is why many see it as acceptable for any business to pay less than a living wage under any circumstance, it's just a roundabout way of making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force
But those people on welfare would receive welfare regardless of whether they're hired or not? I don't see how that's "making taxpayers pay for a businesses labour force".
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm
44% of U.S. workers are employed in low wage jobs with a median annual wage of $18,000. [1]
Sure we can staff fast food with only 16-19 year olds but what about every other sector of the service industry and the myriad of other "low skill" jobs? are there 40 million plus "high skill" jobs out there waiting for the taking? The answer is no. [2]
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minimum-wage-2019-almost-half-o...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/11/21/low-wag...
I'm obviously too retarded for such an advanced concept, but in my head there's no scenario where a utopian UBI-based society is possible, even with more advanced tech. To allow everyone to have food, shelter, and other necessities regardless of their usefulness to society, at the very least we'd have to have severe birth rate restrictions, strong law enforcement, and other fun authoritarian systems that would no longer qualify the environment as a utopia in the eyes of UBI supporters.
Seems like yet another liberal pipe dream that is entirely disconnected from reality, though I'd love to be proven wrong, if anyone has some good reading suggestions on this subject.
Moreover, what's to stop rich people from selling their land? Or abandoning it and moving to another country?
UBI doesn't make any sense to me as CONCEPT. Sure you can find some creative ways to raise some money this year and give it to the poor (or everyone), but how do you create a such a system that continues to function over years and decades?
Money that is given to someone just for existing inherently has no value, so it cannot possibly have much purchasing power. The only things it can buy are things that are subsidized by the government anyway and exists already, such as low income housing and food-stamp-eligible food. What I don't understand is that people seem to think UBI would somehow result in a higher standard of living for people who are already in low income housing and on food stamps, and I just can't think of a mechanism for that.
You seem to be presuming inelastic supply of all of the stuff they'd ever buy. This is relatively true for some stuff (housing supply in the largest urban markets).
But, most of these things are elastic and/or have larger world markets to bid against. Food, consumer goods, housing in other markets, etc. Therefore, while a UBI would be somewhat inflationary, it would still increase the purchasing power of the poor and lower middle class.
> The only things it can buy are things that are subsidized by the government anyway and exists already, such as low income housing and food-stamp-eligible food.
This isn't true, but this is the biggest benefit to UBI: unwind the administrative apparatus involved with entitlements, and remove the lower income regions which have over 100% effective marginal tax rates. A complicated patchwork of programs can be simplified and reduced in scope (SNAP, section 8, EITC, disability insurance, etc..) and we can ensure that people always have a positive marginal incentive to work. Milton Friedman himself proposed a UBI in a form of a "negative income tax" to avoid these economic distortions.
What type of living conditions are we looking to guarantee? If your baseline is "prehistoric living conditions", I'm sure it's quite affordable. If it's "21st century middle class america" it will be ruinously expensive. Incremental improvements in technology can eventually bring us to a point where we can afford to give arbitrary fixed standard of living to everyone, but not if that standard of living is constantly increasing.
That said, to address your point head on, is it possible in the US for everyone to move on to "bigger and better" things? I don't think so which is why we have so many adults with families in min. wage or lowing paying jobs. There is no pool of well paying jobs for them all to move into, there is no magic solution where everyone can have their needs met just by pulling harder on their bootstraps.
So the question then becomes: should a person (or two people) working a full time job be able to provide for themselves and their family? I think the answer to that question is yes. You might disagree, but I don't think its fair to write them off as having a "fantasy".
This may not be the case now, but that can change.
I'm always wary of paraphrasing Graeber, but it's possible that living in a world where a small handful of individuals own the majority of the wealth has led to the market rewarding various jobs in a way that creates more misery than is strictly necessary - for example corporate lawyers being paid hundreds of thousands because they can help billionaires get even richer, while farmers producing the most important of all resources, food, are constantly hovering around the poverty line.
EDIT: and as a mathematician, I would appreciate a proof of your "mathematically impossible" proposition. :)
:) :) :)
One way I'm trying to make sense of is the following: The left is used to being the underdog, the ones fighting for reform against powerful, conservative institutions. They are used to not really stand a chance, it's the spirit that counts. In that position, it makes sense to yell loud, provoking slogans. The people in power will laugh it off, the people you're trying to reach will hear you. But we're in a situation where there are pockets of real power occupied by left-leaning leadership. University campuses. Some parts of the media. Large cities. Certain internet communities. The people in power (who are still largely conservative) are no longer laughing, they're scared. They will use your words against you if they aren't worded well. But it seems left-wing organizers refuse to change their tactics, refuse to acknowledge they entered the mainstream arena.
I still don't get what "abolish the police" is supposed to accomplish. Everyone who bothers understands what it is really about but you don't even have to twist the words, you just have to take them literally and it's a call to pure anarchism. The "blue lives matter" bullshit could have been stopped by changing the slogan to "black lives matter, too". A comedian should not be cancelled for actual, clear-in-context jokes, at least not when genuinely apologizing. A confused college student quoting some Jordan Peterson logic (which he'll likely feel embarrassed for in 5 years without any outside help at all) should not be yelled at in public or you get that shit on Tik Tok as "lefties suppressing free speech". Don't call your work reform movement... "anti-work". Sigh.
Laugh at right-wing stupidity. Take left-wing politics (i.e. European conservative politics) seriously and consider how to implement it in the real world. Do what the right has been doing for centuries, learn from it. They're in the defense now. And the most powerful move on the offense is appearing calm and composed.
This isn't necessarily true. The Democrats in the US had a near stranglehold on Federal politics from the 1950s through the mid-1990s. The Republican ascendence in the 1990s came about in part because Democrat-oriented institutions; e.g., large blue-chip companies, labor unions, and the Federal government itself were viewed as inefficient and corrupt by a portion of the voting population.
> But we're in a situation where there are pockets of real power occupied by left-leaning leadership. University campuses. Some parts of the media. Large cities.
This also isn't necessarily true. Democratic sympathies != left-leaning. And the actual truth is that, going on voting records alone, people in the US mainly vote based on whether they live in more or less densely populated regions. The institutions you've mentioned are all Democrat-leaning because they are predominantly located in more urban areas. Which makes sense, since the policies that Democrats generally support are all more effective at higher population densities.
At the same time the left is fractured into two major camps. One camp is the leadership that seems to end up controlling major movements like Black Lives Matter and subduing it into nothing. This group chooses to not fight. They are benefiting from the status quo.
The other is the "progressive" left that is aiming for European style systems and policies. All they have as a weapon is Twitter and they are not really achieving their goals. What power do "Twitter People" really have if their efforts only translate into gestures from the higher ups(eg. BLM painted on the street in front of the capitol)?
I'm extremely far from agreeing with the anarchist view of work, but your comment contains precisely the dynamic that the piece describes: a cause-focused community gains steam and followers, at which point the message is neutered (despite retaining a now-contradictory name) and those responsible for the movement's success are written out of history and ostracized as unrepresentative weirdos.
Seriously, I recommend reading the piece. It's too late to do so before commenting, but you may take away something more than "God why is this weirdo claiming that she represents antiwork when it's obviously just a board for bored teenagers to post memes about how they hate their job and tepid centrist messages about overtime pay"
A subreddit getting co-opted by the masses to change its intentions is a story as old as reddit. See my username for how I know that to be true.
Hopefully more subreddits will wake up and realize that being included in high activity feeds (r/all, popular) is not necessarily a good thing. We have.
> Speaking of unflattering stereotypes, let’s be blunt for a moment: Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people.
I wholeheartedly agree with this.
I think r/wallstreetbets is still a fantastic place and more or less true to its purpose of finding interesting and novel trades.
Much of the discussion has expanded, to discord (600K users, the limit) as well as the daily reddit talks (Think clubhouse but for reddit).
The daily thread is still fantastic for a very quick list of interesting topics, which you can jump into and have a conversation with anyone.
There still remains a decent sense of camraderie, but there are definitely fewer recognizable names amongst the volume of comments. More time being invested into handing out unique flairs will help with this
Weekday meme restrictions over the past week has largely undone all the damage to the main feed and brought back a larger array of high quality discussion.
Predictions add an interesting dimension to the subreddit where all users can participate regardless of personal wealth.
---
So overall, I'd say it's going very well. There seems to be a significant amount of misconceptions both in the general population, as well as even our regular users, but as long as we continue to do the right thing and protect discussion quality, people will slowly but surely see the light.
Just not the same anymore.
It is very unlikely (I hope) that this environment will happen again.
Nonetheless, can you express exactly what it is that "just [isn't] the same anymore"?
That culture shift extends well beyond WSB, but I think its at least somewhat less obvious here. In my experience, most of the time when people throw out price targets, at most they're predicting a 20%, 25% move, and not the 10x, 100x, or 10,000x you see elsewhere.
I don't think there's really a way, from a moderation perspective at least, to take the dreamers out of the equation... other then waiting and letting them get blown up by their high risk plays.
And just a note, r/wallstreetbets hasn't allowed penny stocks, crypto, or NFTs for many years. (NFTs never)
I find this interesting because to me one of the biggest attractions to Reddit (and HN for that matter) is how deemphasized the user is. I almost never read usernames and rarely remember who anyone is.
For example, in the voice chats, its great when users follow up with one another on their trades, or know each other's specialties so they can call them to provide insight.
On the other hand, deemphasizing the user makes it more about the content and less about the person creating that content, which at best avoids bandwagoning and the whole "I called $foo, so listen to me when I say buy $bar".
That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion, which in turn changes the original community.
As long as the popularity of a subreddit is below a certain threshold, it gets to foster specific discussions on whatever fringe ideology you are interested in, but it never stays that way for long.
It can stay that way, but it's a hard decision to untick these boxes: https://i.imgur.com/E2G9SUh.png
Too early and the sub dies, too late, and you'll wish it died.
https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/2a32sq/experimen...
Apparently, there were some subreddits that got bombarded with unwanted comments which prompted the new feature.
It's located on a page that you only visit once to set up the subreddit, or to make large subreddit changes. (On old reddit, not sure about new reddit)
To Reddit's credit, they have been adding new features over the years to help separate communities and ensure they are somewhat able to maintain their culture.
E.g. Crowd Control which limits the posting / commenting abilities of individual users based on their history or other heuristics.
Aren't you of the opinion this could be misused?
If admins wanted to disappear a viewpoint, it would be a lot easier to just autosuspend the accounts, or shadowban without a trace.
The /r/popular and /r/all pages are intensively manipulated by a constellation of leftist activists. Have you ever noticed just how often the same "screenshots of tweets" submissions from people like AOC end up being reposted ad nauseum across several subreddits that basically share the same message - and most importantly - moderators and power users?
However, you are onto something.
Almost every single post on r/MurderedByAOC is made by u/LrlOurPresident, and those posts hit the front page on a nearly daily basis.
Do you see the same content when browsing in an incognito window?
I ask because I've long suspected Reddit tracks even logged out users, and generates a front page showing them more of things that keep them on the site.
Obviously the site itself leans left.
If the NFL craps astroturfing all over the online sports community that still constitutes manipulation even if the occupants of the sites in question were marginally more predisposed to those ideas than the general population. What the mainstream left does to Reddit with their astroturfing is no different.
I'm not sure Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are hugely fond of progressive politics.
No, by definition, it does not lean in any direction on the political compass.
> at least compared with the US Left/Right divide
More precisely, the overton window of the US goes from center to the far right.
There's a difference between a large amount of users who lean left making posts and comments that align with their views and what looks to be an obviously coordinated effort from a few dozen powermods and powerusers who seem to work 365 days a year to shape the content and discourse of the site through what appears on the frontpage and in the default subreddits.
It's well known that SRS engaged in brigading, but they'll never be held to the same standard as those with ideologies that are less sympathetic.
Don't you think those Redditors are a bit too often bit too dumb to argue with? They ARE! 9/10ths are corporate shills and half of them are bots and the rest are complete boneheads, yeah yeah I agree wholeheartedly. Why not relieve yourself of duties and use that extra time to morally ascend yourself a bit? Watch them run into walls and cry from couple miles away. MSMs are gonna cover them, you won't be missing single bit of it.
Just quit. Click "logout". Going back is as easy as buying a pack of cigarettes and lighting it.
That's what I like about 4chan. In a sea of ungodly acidic garbage lies a golden heart of contrarianism. The posters will argue for a side one day, and 2 hours later will vehemently adopt opposite arguments. Some of the best leftist arguments I have ever read came from /pol/.
4chan argues for the sake of arguing, and I think that is absolutely beautiful in today's environment of everyone taking everything so seriously.
The result is that only stuff that the majority of users allow will get displayed.
I think bigger problem is poor moderation. Most of the mods are driven by some agenda and even propaganda.
Instead of focusing on quality, they focus on how their subreddit content can be aligned to their agenda.
Any user who doesn't comply, gets banned. Since roughly only 1% user actively engage in a subreddit, update macha end with Eco chamber.
HN is no different. Anyone can come here and make any argument.
I'm sorry, what exactly makes the current wars neoliberal?
I can't make the connection you make. When people were protesting against the Iraq War, they were told that they didn't believe in anything. I don't understand personal tragedy as an argument against 4chan; everybody you know is going to die eventually, and virtually everybody you're speaking to has known two people who died prematurely and preventably. I, in particular, don't understand people who traveled to kill instead being killed as an argument against humor.
The idea that a 4chan that didn't exist created Judith Miller is bizarre.
When the internet media and regular media merged one of two things had to happen. Either expose how much of a performance act the old school media was from jump street. Or make the idea of believing everything online at first pass a reasonable position to have.
Q anon grew and continues to exist precisely because it is in the best interests of "respectable" media outlets to not teach media literacy to their consumers.
My null hypothesis is that there are some really loud people on the internet who like to talk loudly about their unpopular ideas. And they're unaware of how deeply unpopular those ideas are until their little corner of the internet suddenly gets mainstream public attention.
I'm seeing this happen now, with r/streamentry.
Maybe there's something about Reddit's algorithm and mechanics that predisposes it to low effort neutered meme content. After all, the default Reddit homepage subreddits are all trash (by the way this isn't unique to Reddit, same goes for say Youtube).
This is why we need platforms where users actually own their data, and can customize their own algorithms and UIs (ie. what web3 hopes to solve).
Simply by exposing conversations to the greater mob. No fascist master plan required.
It's like removing the fence from around a garden.
https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/lo6wov/my_dads_a_...
> "My dads a “working class hero” I wanna punch him in the face, we wanted to visit this weekend, we haven’t seen him in 2 months due to covid, we have three kids and so does he (6, 8 and 9) his wife passed away 2 years ago, and he’s been back to work for a year, he is on salary and gets no overtime, what’s he doing right now on this beautiful winter Saturday morning? Fucking working over time... not for money, but because they “need” him... fuck you, your family needs you and you been working 50 h a week on salary for 20 fucking years. Fucken boomers."
When I read this, I see "haven't seen him in two months," "we have three kids and so does he (6, 8 and 9) his wife passed away," and "your family needs you."
When the author read this, he saw "criticizing his father for hard work."
I think we can all agree that the emotional cost to your family is a major, defining symptom of being a workaholic. This appears to be someone seeking support for that, but the author tries to ignore the emotional reality and paper it over with, well, honestly I don't need to rephrase it, I'm sure it's obvious.
Neglecting to spend time with your family can be just as bad as neglecting to provide for them. If it didn't happen so often maybe we wouldn't have so make kids growing up with a deep-set hatred of jobs. You don't need to be Freud to make that association. ;)
Although his siblings are being raised by a single dad, so maybe he needs to not work on saturdays?
This is how I read it. And in that context there's a heck of a lot to read between the lines.
Nobody gets their kids out of the house and then starts another family because the first try turned out great.
Sounds like dad doesn't want to spend time with someone. When your options are the middle aged dude putting in OT and raising more kids and the person airing their family drama on the internet who gets the benefit of the doubt isn't much of a choice.
These kids need to travel to find out the reality of the world.
Military deployments are hard on families. Not sure what to add to that but it's a fact.
I feel this would be something relatable to a large portion of the people on this site, given how many of us practically live our tech careers. Even if we aren't putting in overtime at work, many of us spend time not at work on personal projects or learning some new tech. We might think of it as different from work, but for an outsider it'll just seem like more work.
It's also a sort of hypocrisy since if the point of the movement is to allow people to be free to do what they find meaning in, surely it's contradictory to diminish what someone finds meaning in just because you don't think it pays enough.
I know that if I had someone who didn't care for how fulfilling tech work is to me, I'd probably end up avoiding them too. Back when I went through a similar phase with my family, I too just buried myself more in work to not have to deal with them. Now they do understand, so I end up spending more time with them.
A community, by definition, cannot be build single-handedly.
Especially a large subreddit, where hundreds of thousands visitors posted stuff, commented, upvoted and publicized the subreddit in other communities.
It's usually called "reformism" by people who support actual change.
Maybe this fits under the umbrella of reformism, but is not synonymous.
This is what happened to antiwork. They couldn't disseminate existing ideas and absorb the influx of new culture fast enough, so their culture became the incoming culture, which was approximately that of reddit.
If a group has to choose between an idealized echo chamber of non-action and a washed-out version of the same thing but with real change in peoples' lives, I would take the latter.
Of course, having a position does not make a plan tenable.
Now whether communism actually works or not is another matter, but I don't really see where you get the "free shit" angle.
This is the fantasy.
> You're still very much expected to work
This is the reality. They contradict each other. The State will coerce you to work regardless of your "need" for it.
Contrast that with the (to use TFA's terminology) "gentrifiers" who blow like ideological tumbleweeds and hold beliefs simply based on whether those beliefs are advantageous to hold (Stalin would be proud).
Principled extremists can be reasoned with. Compromises can be made. Progress can happen. Unprincipled faux-extremists are like herding cats. You give them one thing and they show up the next day bitching that you gave them the wrong thing. I know who I'd rather deal with.
I think you've defined that they don't make compromises when you called them principled extremists. ;) But I do agree that they have advantages over opportunists who don't believe anything: sometimes an extremist will have discovered a nugget of truth that you can take out from the rest, while an opportunist only believes things that are wholly circumstantial and unlikely to help you.
Represents the "movement", or represents the sub? They obviously still represented the sub - they were there when it got created, were a moderator, were picked by other moderators to be a representative of the subreddit in media events (which is conflated with the nebulous concept of "the movement")
The issue here is that the "movement" may not be represented by Doreen, but there may not even be a movement outside of the sub, and they do represent the sub. A lot of people treat "the movement" and "the sub" as basically being equivalent. They may actually be equivalent. If the sub shut down, there isn't really any guarantee that the same kind of antiwork internet discourse would be as loud, focused and frequent as it is right at this moment.
Does it represent a movement, or a TV channel?
If it's a movement, by what process was it elected?
Point being I doubt anyone at Fox was unhappy with how the Doreen interview turned out.
Did they ask to interview anyone else from the sub?
All this really does is highlight the difference between online opinionation - always easy - and effective activism. The latter is much harder and absolutely needs informed - ideally effective and professional - handling of public presentation and messaging.
That sounds like a ton of work.
It's one of the issues with subreddits as they get larger. Low effort "look how great I am for standing up to my boss" posts win the day.
Yeah, and what else could you expect from Jessie Waters? He's a smug propagandist, and people like Doreen Ford are perfect for his message. It's pretty stupid to cooperate with him unless you 1) agree with him, or 2) have good reason to believe you're up to effectively representing yourself to a hostile audience through a sleazy host, all of whom are more interested in mocking you than listening to you. And frankly, if they ask you for an interview, it that's probably good reason to believe #2 is false.
The broader social epistemic question of "what makes someone a representative?" or "How do people gain the social status: representative?" is the most interesting part of this. Reddit itself plays a role in the construction of representative status by visually framing mods in the sidebar under the subreddit rules section leading people to mentally label both as the rules and rule-makers of the space. There are examples of mods in other subreddits also being representatives, making it natural to apply that syllogistically and generally to all Reddit communities.
If a mod created the sub, and actively participates, but is disavowed as a representative, are they still a representative? Would this have changed if the interview had gone well? How does representation work when communities disagree? Antiwork members don't see Doreen as a representative, but individuals outside of antiwork do. Does that make her a representative or not? It's fascinating that what is obvious to one person is a tremendous number of questions to another.
by reddit's rules, yes. You have to be fundamentally destroying a decently large and active sub before the admins step in and kick out a mod. But the number of times this has happened in 15 years can be counted on one hand.
Otherwise, admins don't care about what mods do with their subs. seniority first, most senior mods ultimately has the power to kick out everyone else and ban every user if they wish. And that's why these kinds of "movements" are doomed to fail under reddit's structure.
The phenomenon of a movement's founders going on to reject what the movement has become (or maybe has always been) is pretty common. If I take the article's claims at face value, this is just the inverse of that. The movement became something that rejected its founder.
As someone completely detached and not a part of this “antiwork” movement in any way, your post reads to me like someone who joined the community in its later stages and are bristling at what you think is a takedown that is trying to misrepresent your “totally normal, reasonable views of advocating for better working conditions”. And maybe the replacement of anarcho-communists with people advocating better working condition is a good thing! The tragedy is that the current, moderate ideals are mismatched with the original, extremist group name and ideals. Thus the need for “sane-washing” like so—
New member: “Actually anti-work isn’t about not working, it’s really about improving working conditions.”
Original anti-work founder: “No we literally are anti-work and want to abolish work.”
New member: “Nooooo you don’t represent us!!”
Like that is the exact process described. Same dynamic if you s/antiwork/abolish the police/
whenever i have cake, i tend to eat it also?
EDIT:
Let me make it more clear, as English may not be your first language, if you're asking this question in truth (I sometimes miss sarcasm online, sorry).
Cakes can be beautiful things which people (of a certain time period, especially) wanted to show off as a sign of their wealth, as refined sugar was expensive. Once it was eaten, you could no longer display such wasteful extravagance.
It's a forum where everyone was typing in English, so my first assumption was that English was your fist language. I didn't say anything about American. And I tried to fix my mistake =/
You can either eat your cake or have your cake. You cannot eat your cake, and then also have it too.
More on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_can%27t_have_your_cake_and...
The author has a very clear agenda here, and while they're welcome to construct a case for that view, they've left out inconvenient details while attempting to appear neutral.
The core issue is that the subreddit already had an agreement that no one would attempt to represent the movement or do interviews. The forethought there was that a reddit mod (or similar) are unlikely to be sufficiently prepared to act as a spokesperson for a politically sensitive movement. Doreen's actions were entirely self-serving and the subreddit was absolutely right to make a stand, especially as Doreen did not represent the community or its views - as given by the enormous backlash.
It's deeply disingenuous to suggest that the work reform principles of the subreddit are moot because a mod started the original subreddit as a protest against work.
This point might stand better using a word other than "principle," from principium (beginning), from princeps (initiator).
On Reddit, r/AskHistorians has a good approach. The blogging model (as revived by Substack) also seems to work.
These are explicitly non-democratic. AskHistorians gives historians higher status. A blog is about whatever the blog author wants it to be about.
Hacker News has good moderation but it's a lot more anti-tech than it used to be and that's a reflection of the broader culture. If they really wanted to resist that then it would require stronger moderation at the expense of growth.
The stories I was reading must have been written by teenagers, nobody in leadership does or says half the things on that sub.
One post today was saying how their manager was planning to fire them 6 months from now... NO manager does that, *ever*. If someone is not meeting expectations termination is at most 2 months away, in America anyway. Anyone who is surprised by their termination due to performance really is not paying attention. Only a person with no professional experience would make these stories up.
I have definitely seen cases where someone was obviously really struggling with the quality of their work; i.e. others having to massively go through rounds of reworking their output to the point that they had negative productivity. Yet when they were eventually let go, they were shocked and surprised. Some people have pretty low awareness.
You confront authentic (troubled) person doing what she wants with another human so meticulously styled, plucked, tanned and dressed at corporate expense, walking at extremely shot leash with every one of his words tightly controlled, with all the scripted emotions. He looks as if he was a voice box made of plastic.
With this contrast you see how bad the work is, even if antiwork is not perfect either at the moment.
You usually watch news as if it was normal. You look at news anchors as if they were people, not corporate half-robots. Only such contrast gives you a chance to see them for what they are.
I haven't been able to watch the news in about 20 years. Pro wrestlers are more sincere than most news anchors
We had something of that world. Firing Line was on air for thirty years, and many other countries had or have comparable programmes.
It's been a long de-evolution, not a radical destruction. Every innovation in media communication was that little bit faster, that little bit more palatable, but it's a one-way street, and hard to reverse.
My mother (born 1951) can't enjoy any film made after 2000, they're too frantic and they stress her. My ex-girlfriend (born 1996) couldn't enjoy any film made before 1990, they were too slow and they bored her to sleep. I have to put effort into reading books rather than relatively short essays nowadays.
I don't think there can be an implosion, at this point. We need a future generation, sometime after Z, that will grow up thinking that ten-second TikTok videos are the peak of uncool and something only old stodgy zoomers can enjoy.
Like AntiWork, It seems to have been started by those who genuinely wanted to abolish the police. But as time went on people joined who instead wanted to reform the police by dramatically cutting back what they were meant to respond to. But the slogan stayed, and was very misleading and puzzling to most people.
I have a hard time figuring out whether:
1) all the people who are saying "no we don't really mean defund the police" are just the moderate elements battling it out with the extreme elements (eg. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...)
2) most of them actually want the police to be abolished, but they're doing a motte and bailey[1] whenever they're confronted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
We spend a whole lot on policing compared to most other developed nations, and we're not getting terrific outcomes either on civil liberties or crime rates. It might be time to take a different approach where we spend a lot less on direct policing, and redeploy a lot of those resources to fight crime in other ways.
The developed countries that spend more or similar amounts tend to do it by spending on more highly trained officers than we do.
On the other hand, maybe we're just so socioculturally fucked that it requires massive authoritarian investment to keep a crummy level of peace. I'm undecided.
making defense and police funding continue to increase but at a slightly slower rate is referred to by opponents as "defunding"
This statement disturbs me. Please clarify.
- The money is poorly spent, and better (perhaps less) spending would obtain better outcomes
- Because of other factors, we're doing approximately as well as we can: if we deployed resources away from the authoritarian, heavy-handed mechanisms, we'd have even more crimes and bad outcomes.
I think the former is more likely, but I can't entirely exclude the latter.
I think people both understate how splintered the US society really is, and overstate the importance of this divide.
Imagine a country with a HUGE historical and current influx of immigrants that bring tons of different cultures and ideologies into the mix. The country has traditionally been hard to govern, especially at the federal level, precisely because it encourages freedom of thought and expression through both law and immigration policy. Its economic structure further encourages division by being one of the most meritocratic systems on the planet, where material gains for good decisions are quite the norm, but where the divide between the haves and have nots is always growing, and always on display.
In a country I describe, why is it any surprise to anyone that criminal behavior will be more common than in a more cohesive environment, therefore necessitating a more strict policing approach? And in what world does it make sense to reduce police powers in such a country without suffering the obvious increase in crime that will follow that?
It's not that US is fundamentally broken or fucked up, it's just a very different place compared to the "liberal utopias" of Northern Europe, so often cited by leftist activists in the states.
- is splintered
- is divided
- is hard to govern
- has an economic structure that encourages division
- has an increasing dive between the haves and have nots
Or they can move to a country that is already more in line with what they want out of society.
Relying on the police to prevent crime is like relying on firefighters to prevent fires or paramedics to prevent injuries. Sure they have a role to play, but logically they should only be the last resort in case everything else goes wrong.
I would likewise think that anyone who wanted to "defund NASA" had the intention of getting rid of the agency, rather than a more nuanced position of "we should stop funding SLS so that we can reallocate the money on high school STEM outreach and climate satellites."
You fund something when it has too little money.
You defund something when it has too much money.
If you wanted to abolish or eliminate something you would use those words, not defund.
As a thought experiment, I'm going to conjure a slogan: "Defund the Humane Society".
What is the first thing that comes to mind? I expect most people would think "you want to get rid of the animal shelter?" And I would reply, "no what I actually want is to re-allocate money from the euthanasia program so that we can have increased adoption rates and make this a no-kill shelter."
Putting aside the vernacular implications of "defund", my slogan is totally ineffective at actually capturing what I am trying to accomplish. And, it has the added downside of giving people a terrible and inaccurate first impression.
I think there’s an assumption that crime is random and that people randomly commit them. In that case it doesn’t matter if you arrest because what’s the point, it’s random.
But people usually commit crimes intentionally. And they commit multiple crimes.
Fire is different than crime in that it’s not conscious.
I don’t think police are alone in preventing crime but they aren’t a last resort. I also think we spend too much on police. And we spend on the wrong things. I want to reform the police to make them more effective.
Gaslighting is very mainstream and seems so commonplace in even banal, insubstantial things like debating whether “defund police” means to remove funding from the police or something else.
If someone advocates for more funding for social workers and mental health care, they can just say so. That funding doesn't necessarily need to come from police budgets.
If someone advocates to "defund Planned Parenthood", they would be disappointed with a mere reduction in funding.
That slogan was straight up political malpractice. If you have to explain your position, then you're already losing.
Something like "government accountability" or "serve the people" probably could have gotten wider support than "defund the police."
https://www.propublica.org/article/medicare-for-all-is-not-m...
Or "Make American Great Again" or "Build Back Better". Any slogan can be questioned. IMO, "Defund the Police" is almost the most straightforward political slogan I can think of and if you Google it, near the top result is a website explaining exactly what it means.
https://defundthepolice.org/
The problem with a lot of people who were questioning "Defund the Police" in my experience is that they would go to BLM protests but then be much more moderate and not actually interested in what the protests meant or what defunding the police actually means; the slogan wasn't unclear, it was wanting to look like you cared but not actually doing the work to convince yourself or learn more.
I think this is a really good example of an effective slogan, both in Reagan's initial use and later Trump's. It has some really critical properties: it's easy to comprehend, while also nimble enough to fit anyone's notions, and you can't argue against it directly.
If you have to direct people to "Google it," then your slogan is a non-starter. I'm not a marketing expert (hence the rather dry alternatives), but I am aware of how wildly effective conservative-leaning messaging is compared to the often off-putting (even if well-intentioned) liberal-messaging on the other side. So then, why not use the same tactics? Government accountability is a good thing, and you really can't argue against it. If it makes sense to demand a lot of accountability at a high standard from teachers (and teacher unions), then the very same demands should be put on police (and police unions). Use the same exact messaging.
"Defund the Police" had a specific meaning which was to actually defund the police but, as with any actual implementation, when you get to the specifics people have a lot of different views and opinions. I don't think you combat that by making a better slogan, I think you just deal with it. The handwringing over what "Defund the Police" means was a huge distraction IMO and mostly bad actors who disagreed with the premise fundamentally and weren't looking for real ways to implement policies.
> If it makes sense to demand a lot of accountability at a high standard from teachers (and teacher unions), then the very same demands should be put on police (and police unions). Use the same exact messaging.
Okay, what's the exact, unquestionable slogan you would use here? Good luck.
I absolutely agree with you here, and this is the point I'm trying to emphasize. Slogans have to be aspirational and adaptable and unassailable. "MAGA" is all three. "Defund the police" is really only aspirational and sort-of-adaptable. Its weakness is that it's easy to oppose it and look like you have the moral high ground (i.e., being a crime-fighter). You can't attack "MAGA" directly without sounding like you hate America. That's the brilliance of it.
>"Defund the Police" had a specific meaning which was to actually defund the police but, as with any actual implementation, when you get to the specifics people have a lot of different views and opinions. I don't think you combat that by making a better slogan, I think you just deal with it. The handwringing over what "Defund the Police" means was a huge distraction IMO and mostly bad actors who disagreed with the premise fundamentally and weren't looking for real ways to implement policies.
This is where we disagree. The policy specifics don't matter. Not at the slogan/rallying level. "Defund the police" has a pretty clear policy roadmap, even if it could take on varying shades. "MAGA" is completely devoid of policy, and that's what makes it such a strong talking point. Anyone can attach whatever aspiration they want to it without getting mired up in boring details. This results in widespread acceptance.
>Okay, what's the exact, unquestionable slogan you would use here? Good luck.
I never claimed to have the correct answer here. All I'm doing is pointing out how horrifically bad "defund the police" is and offering field-tested examples of slogans that are so much better at inspiring action, for better or worse (e.g., MAGA). Something closer to a jazzed-up version of "government accountability" or "police competence" would have all the desirable properties of "MAGA" that I've described: aspirational and adaptable and unassailable. "Defund the police" ain't it.
And anyways, again, I highly disagree that any slogan is unassailable. A lot of people still attacked "MAGA" so where is the line that you measure "unassailablity"? I could say to someone against "Defund the Police" that you hate Black people but there just isn't widespread support for that opinion like there is with being anti american. "Defund the Police" is a compromise slogan, "Abolish the Police" is the more radical version and arguably even clearer and less assailable but again mainstream US culture just doesn't want to face that reality.
Also, adaptable slogans are great for campaigns (where you probably don't want to assign policy specifics) and conservatives (who largely agree on everything already) but not for positions that are supposed to end up with policy changes. What adaptable slogan is there for leftist movement that's asking specifically to tackle the issue of police violence? The problem with adaptable slogans is they become compromised or co-opted. "Black Lives Matter" became a the conservative rally "All Lives Matter" and "Blue Lives Matter". Can this be avoided on the left by a more adaptable slogan? I doubt it.
So, okay maybe there's some slightly better slogan than "Defund the Police" but at the end of the day it's not the slogan that's the issue, it's liberals that don't actually agree with the basic idea but want to pretend they're still pro-left or whatever.
Edit: to complete the thought, all of this is to say, all the disagreement with the slogan is overall to a bad faith, pointless end. If the media and liberals and whoever are spending a bunch of time arguing about the slogan, it's time that could have been spent discussing and negotiating policy specifics. But liberals and mainstream media didn't want to do that. So we ended up with a lot of arguing about a slogan and not much actual policy and the police won.
> If there's footage of police killing unarmed people in their homes or in broad daylight, then we should absolutely demand more competence and professionalism from them
This happened so much. Did you see all the videos of police violence during BLM and before and after? I don't think the problem is the slogan.
It was just adopted by a bunch of people that didn't actually agree with it, which is why it doesn't make sense.
And it wasn't a misinterpretation because the movement literally tried to entirely defund several major police departments.
Who do you mean when you say "the movement"?
Defund the police means defunding the police. Over half of all city taxes go to funding the police forces, who do little to no good for the community with the money they're given. Buying more tanks and assault weapons and fancy cars and employing people who live in big macmansions in the suburbs isn't helping us.
Concervatives act like the word "defund" means the same as "abolish" when talking about the police, but then are happy to talk about defunding education, or defunding planned parenthood, or defunding medicare, defunding social security, defunding sanctuary cities, etc fully expecting their base to understand that they don't mean "abolish".
They want to abolish sanctuary cities, abolish planned parenthood, abolish medicare, abolish social security and abolish state-run education standards.
Moderates don't want to abolish most of those things, but hardcore conservatives completely do.
Another facet of the same view is that the police are assumed to be inherently so far gone and corrupt that reform is not possible, and to assume that it is is futile.
"Defund the police!"
"Do you mean 'defund the police'?"
"Of course not!"
The budget moved to mental health & rehab would be handled under a different agency than the police, which is something that is constantly argued over. Many opponents of defund the police agree with the overall budget reallocation, but they believe the budget should not change agencies.
What opponents need to understand about the movement is that police would have less to do, as many emergency calls would be handled by actual professionals. So if they still need their mini tanks, assault weapons, and SWAT gear, they can still make a case based on their newly lightened responsibilities.
The amount of funding a police department has is determined at the beginning of the fiscal year and by how much was spent by the previous year, including any shortfalls or excesses in budgetary spending. City councils and Mayors/DA's are always looking to trim the police budget (believe it or not), so a lot of the time, the department will take any excess budget they have at the end of the year and spend it on military auction items (a whole other mess), in order to keep their budget and show that they've been able to stretch their budget as far as they can and get the most value for their dollar (I read a very good article about it like 2 years ago, or so and can't find it). But departments do this so they don't lose their future budgets, "just in case" they need to hire future officers, need more "real" equipment, etc. etc.
This has lead to the increase in militarization of the police and the militarization of the tactics of the police as military personnel are already familiar with the equipment. There has been no same said impetus to increase nonviolent intervention tactics on an ever increasingly divisive nation, who's "news" cycle and social networks actively work to stoke division and tension as it feeds interaction, which provides more eyes on advertisement (sorry, I went down a rabbithole in the end, there).
It would be better, well it would be a start, to have quarterly budget reviews and performance reviews tied to the needs of the community and training. But, we all know that isn't how politics works =(
…to you. Not everyone agrees and the simple fact that this discussion is taking place and you are defending this slogan would seem to render this purported clarity moot.
I think some radicals wanted to remove all funding, and radicals on the other side latched onto that and spread that as if it were the truth.
Defund the police has mostly been about reallocating budgets between agencies. There are, however, a few specific branches of police that protestors have want shut down, but not to remove policing entirely.
Specifically, the perspective I'm bothered by, is that of being pro-police intervention when it's for a cause you don't support, but calling to defund the police when they're disrupting a protest you _do_ support.
Edit: The analogue on the right (but not as clean I guess) would be the attempt to reframe the Jan 6 protests after that utter "embarrassment." They wanted to overturn the election but now the right is spinning hard to reframe the rhetoric. Basically your radicals work hard building a groundswell and excitement around some idea, eventually embarrass themselves, and you have to do damage control. That's modern day national politics.
What? It always meant lower police funding. If it meant abolish the police, the slogan would have been abolish the police
The police abolition movement coined the slogan.
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qstsdp/my_5year_g...
Better representation of anti-work- and its crime- having the hacker mentality and the audacity to execute a similar move to investors/big players without the funds.
Very few in our society are still needed to work, many who work do more harm then good (to the environment & themselves) and most of the work done today, exists to massage the egos of power-animals who can not avoid a existential crisis without a pyramid of suffering beneath them.
Remote work has revealed how obsolete that caste and its longings are. Its also has shown that work is partially used to keep the "uneducated" masses from going haywire with conspiracy theories. (6 Jan comes to mind)
Which is a psychological problem worth of solving, but not one that is actually a decent enough argument to protect this institution of self-flagellation without any reward, except continued existence in protestant-work-ethic-purgatory.
- Radicals set new bar for discourse.
- Aligned moderates adopt and modify message
- Radicals are ousted from their own movement by the new moderate messaging
- Moderates are left to try and defend their position that is garbed in extreme optics
But regarding the actual topic of work I think it sets up a false dichotomy; that one is either a sane normal person who thinks productivity is good, or an out-of-touch anarcho-communist.
There is actually a very large middle ground which represents the most balanced view towards work; that most work is a necessary evil. It's not that work is good or desirable, it's that it (both individually and as a society) is necessary for survival or to maintain a certain standard of living.
If technology and automation could allow those who wanted to have only a 10-hour work week, with the same lifestyle, that would be unequivocally a good thing.
I'm not an anarchist, but in this sense I am very much anti-work.
Why? Work is a net positive in people's lives.
If what you're saying is really more along the lines of "having a project and way to spend the time is a net positive", then I completely agree, but I don't think that has to be tightly coupled to work (as in employment) per se.
It allows you to contribute to society and get social validation. "Personal projects" typically do neither (if they did, they would be lucrative). Even the boring stuff can be meditative. Provided the conditions are adequate, work is good for people and society at large.
Capitalism, on the other hand...
I am not sure how useful this idea is as a concept. The Libertarian party had a similar history (its original platform had something to do with keeping leaded gasoline legal...) but it doesn't matter now.
> I’m arguing you’re going to “sanewash” it. And by that I mean, what you do is go “Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]”.
"No sane person would belive %movement_belief%, what we really believe is %moderate-not_insane-image_saving-fake_belief%.
See also: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewpulrang/2021/02/20/its-ti...
I wonder how many of these 4chan like places exist under the radar just waiting for a Google algorithm tweak or a viral meme to go big and destroy their formerly tolerant communities.