The struggle of any complex ideas (and given the complexity of the world, any ideas worth a damn are complex) is that core concepts can often end up being ripped from context and simplified. Even very smart and wise people have trouble not doing this- the complexities are so numerous that it is impossible for any one person to keep it all straight all the time. At least, I’ve never met one who I thought could, and even if I did, I’d never tell them so, because I think the moment you think you are such a person you cease to have any chance of being so.
Is there a cop out there who will refuse to evict anyone? Who will leave a homeless person who’s not hurting anyone alone? The law requires anyone who enforces it to do things that make them a bastard. Someone else who’s not currently up at three in the morning is likely to be able to expand on this betted.
ACAB is not about each individual cop being a bastard, it’s about cops being part of a system that forces them to be bastards. Imagine if you will a hypothetical “good” SS officer. They would still be forced to take part in all the things the SS officers do, and thus would no longer be good, or no longer be an SS officer.
Policing in America is a less extreme variant of this. “The Thin Blue Line” exists to protect extremist cop behavior, and cops who don’t toe the line are penalized. For instance a cop who stopped another cop from strangling someone was fired and charged. A cop who tried to report on police abuses in NYC was forceably imprisoned in a mental institution. A cop who tried to stop a suicidal person without killing them was charged with “endangering police officers.”
There are plenty of small towns in America with 2-4 cops, perhaps many of them have reasonable police officers who want to help the community. And that’s great for them (plenty also do not, or have a very interesting definition of community). But for large police forces, if you don’t toe the thin blue line, you’re not allowed to be a cop. And that means that all of those cops are bastards, whether they started out wishing to be or not.
Sharizard
Excellent explanation. Thank you very much.
Zaxares
Thanks for this explanation. It was really enlightening. 🙂 That said, we should probably rename the expression ACAB (along with “defund the police”) because on first glance it is REALLY misleading and is probably costing us support from neutral or uninformed people who read the abbreviation and draw an utterly incorrect (but nonetheless quite understandable) conclusion from it.
Hat
Zaxares, pretty much every progressive idea is twisted by bad actors.
“Black Lives Matter,” a pretty benign statement when you think about it, became some horribly controversial thing
“Woke,” was literally just “aware of systemic issues in society”, and is now meant to be anything conservatives don’t like.
“DEI” is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. All good things.
Hell, “Feminism” is treated as some kind of matriarchal, man-hating club
They aren’t confused as to what the words mean. They actively fight to twist the words.
Tequila Mockingbird
There are well-meaning people who do misunderstand, but you’re right; they often misunderstand because bad actors intentionally muddy the waters. The bad guys know the longer we have to explain and defend ourselves, the more time they have to rob us blind (of money, of rights, of infrastructure, etc.)
thejeff
Sure, but we don’t need to make it easier for them. They can and will twist anything we say, but we don’t need to make it easier for them. Things like “defund the police” that are already misleading on first glance don’t help anyone.
Taffy
What’s misleading about that?
AK
The fact that no one who wants to do it actually wants to do the thing everyone who first hears it assumes the sentence means? Like if your slogan needs explaining while making people think they know what you’re about it’s not a great slogan, and “defund the police” did damage to progressives with black and brown communities specifically in addition to being weaponized by the right.
Messaging does matter. That piece is particularly ineffective.
Sharizard
There are plenty of people out there who still see the police system overall as a force of good. Think the older generations and just generally people who don’t majorly focus on the news cycles and aren’t regularly seeing all the evidence against the police. To these people, ‘Defund the police’ may seem like either a really dumb idea, or something insidious.
You want your slogan to make sense to someone who’s mostly clueless as to what’s going on, otherwise you’re just preaching to your choir. Random spitballing but something like ‘Policing Must Change’ or ‘Police Justice, Not Police Brutality’ would at least make it clearer that you’re not seeking to weaken the notions of security that people see the police as safeguarding.
Hampsterpig
I will not disagree with your intent but a significant issue is getting clear messaging across. In the age of hashtags and slogans repeated 1000 times a minute in your media feeds, it’s difficult to get someone to read a 3 paragraph explanation of a political idea.
Take “Make America Great Again.” What does that mean exactly? It’s a nice phrase, but doesn’t say much. Now people might look into what the message means, or maybe just take it at its face value in blind support.
All Cops Are Bastards operates by the same rule. For a lot of people, that base idea resonates. For others, they may look into what that phrase actually means. The important bit is people hear the slogan and get interested enough to learn more. For that you need a bold statement to catch people’s attention in the barrage of messaging that is modern social media.
Basically, ACAB fits on a signboard, and anyone seeing that signboard might look it up and then get the actual message you replied to. Another timely example is “From the river to the sea.” I heard people chanting that and then looked it up.
Li
Not interested in going through all the effort of creating new terms that will only be immediately twisted again, as Hat noted.
It’s also just much better to explain to people that the right misrepresents terms, so that they’ll learn to be more skeptical of right-wing definitions, than to capitulate to the right’s deliberately misleading definitions — not only legitimizing their definitions but their tactics.
Not to mention constantly playing defense and spending all our time trying to come up with new terms to describe things, instead of actually making any progress on these conversations.
Stephen Bierce
Heck, the “Mayberry” paradigm of a peaceable kingdom small town with a token police department was considered a fantasy even back when it was made–especially in the face of the real Jim Crow South. I won’t name a name, but near where I was living a few years ago, there is a notorious state line town where the Sheriff just had a few above-board officers under his command, but was also in with the local organized crime families, who could loan him thugs to handle the Sheriff’s dirty work. The Sheriff finally got busted, but it’s been impossible to replace both him and his Deputies as there aren’t a lot of local men qualified for the jobs. And if you’re a GOOD man, why would you WANT to be a cop in a place like that?
Meagan
What your comment brings to mind is how people in these positions can have opportunities to do good, and these probably go unnoticed by history. For example in the movie JoJo Rabbit (spoiler ahead)
we see someone in the German military who has clearly become disillusioned with Hitler step into a situation in a way that saves multiple lives – and he’s not found out by his peers, thankfully. Then again near the end of the movie, he takes action to protect someone more innocent than him and sacrifices himself in the process (or at least doesn’t try to help his situation).
No one is morally pure and I personally couldn’t stand the assaults on my integrity that I’m sure being a police officer would present while trying to do any good in that positions. But if a saying that is supposed to be a systemic critique and people consistently misunderstand it, I want better slogans that don’t just drive culture wars.
Meagan
I missed articulating one of my main points, which is that sometimes people in the most morally compromised positions can also take actions that no one else could for good.
Willoughby Chase
Bad example.
SS recruits were chosen because they were anti-semitic thugs.
One of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen held two PhDs
Because Police are mandated to be suspicious of everything, even innocuous or innocent actions made with nervousness. In Short, All cops are bastards because they are paid to be whether they want to or not. Even the so called “good ones”?
There are always going to be evil people out there. They don’t need to be many to ruin everything for everyone. You know the saying about how a rotten apple spoils the bunch? Once rot appears, it propagates fast.
Evil people will set up to rule over other people. Criminal behavior of coercion, extortion, even abduction and enslavement appear spontaneously. With more people under their sway, they go out to use their force to enslave even more people, until they run out of free people nearby and at that point they go raid other criminal lords.
This is basically how the ancestors of nation states appeared. People took power by force and fought other of their ilk over who would get to oppress the most people.
Once you get to rule over a lot of people, however, power can no longer be exercised directly. You need to delegate, to have intermediaries, lieutenants, etc. That’s where a need to have some sort of legitimacy comes into play, and that’s where we have a long list of thinkers who came up with differences between a just ruler and an unjust one, and of better ways to reprogram the criminal racketeering and enslaving enterprise that was at the origin of the state into something that will benefit the people instead of oppress them.
But despite many revolutions and enlightened ideals, this was never fully achieved. The state is still, at its core, a machine of oppression that we have to tolerate mostly because it protects us from worse oppression.
Nowadays, it is harder for an evil man with ambitions to just take over a tribe and then snowball from there. Precisely because there are those states out there. So you can either work within the system (join the state), or against the system (join organized crime), or both at once (be a corrupt member the state).
And this is where ACAB comes from. It’s not about each and every single member of the police being a bad person; it’s about the entire system being bad — at best, a necessary evil; at worst, just an evil.
There’s a big show being made of how police and military should not obey illegitimate orders. How the “just following orders” excuse famously didn’t fly in the Nuremberg trials. And yet, can’t you think of some recent illegitimate orders being passed, and dutifully obeyed without complaint? Can’t you think of how people who are supposed to swear an oath to protect the Constitution are allowing blatantly unconstitutional things to happen because they’re just following orders?
asmodai27
And this is where ACAB comes from. It’s not about each and every single member of the police being a bad person; it’s about the entire system being bad.
That is the exact problem with the wording ACAB: it appears to place the blame on every individual cop, which makes the claim and the views behind it really easy to misunderstand.
People not already familiar with the more nuanced interpretation don’t get it, and often oppose the oversimplified wording rather than the actual ideas, as illustrated by Differentiator’s message.
Xujhan
Alas, the effectiveness of a slogan tends to be inversely proportional to how accurately it reflects reality. “Refocus police efforts on local care and train officers to be social workers first, crime-fighters second” doesn’t really get people fired up to go and protest, even if it’s what’s actually needed. One *hopes* that the people shouting ACAB understand this, although I’ve been on the internet long enough to become rather cynical about that.
thejeff
But what does “effectiveness of a slogan” really mean? If it gets those who understand it fired up to go protest, but drives a bigger backlash from those who take it more literally, is that really effective?
Big Z
Don’t forget, when calculating that, the fact that the right wing will deliberately twist the meanings of any and all slogans no matter how innocuous — see Hat’s post above, but witness how “Black Lives Matter” is treated basically like a scam, a racist anti-white argument, and a violent anti-cop slogan all at once.
In other words, when the backlash is artificial and will exist no matter what slogan you use, why even consider it?
Li
As I said above: it’s both a waste of time and effort to constantly reinvent new terms that the right is just gonna twist again and actively counterproductive to concede that a given term was “bad”.
It legitimizes the tactic.
And it does nothing to increase wariness around right wing twisting.
Much better investment of time to raise awareness of how the right keeps twisting terms so that people are more prepared for the next twist.
Opus the Poet
Just a reminder that the movie Serpico was a dramatization of the true story of my addled mind wants to say Frank Serpico’s battle against dirty cops. Lemme Google that first name. Googled and corrected. He even took “friendly” fire during a drug raid.
Meagan
Or people get on board with the non systemic interpretation of it and focus their energy on hatred for individual cops rather than changing and improving the system that leads to the critique.
I’ve found that thoughts on cops and their ilk is a lot more broad outside of the US.
For example, in my home country, Cops are mostly respected and trusted to do the right thing (because there are systems that actually sack and remove the pension of cops that break the code of conduct), while it is the Military that is hated and distrusted. And that comes from the simple fact that my homecountry was under a military dictatorship for 30 years.
The same talking points about cops being jackbooted thugs of the state that exist only to be the boot on the neck of the people are directed towards the Military, because it was them who did that, and not even under a veneer of “Law and Justice”, but because the Generalissimo demanded it.
In the words of Brennan Lee Mulligan:
“Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just a promise of violence that’s enacted and police are basically an occupying army, ya know what I mean?”
Which is to say ACAB is true because the institution of a police force – especially nowadays – is there to protect and serve the interests of the ruling classes, rather than protect and serve the interests of the people.
Unfortunately good cops just don’t last. They either get pulled to the bad side, or fired, or driven to suicide. The system of cops is an always has been corrupt and harmful. Link below is written by an ex-cop who is in hiding due to fear of doxxing and retaliation. He explains it very well.
Its along the same line as “no ethical consumption in capitalism”, but people have oversimplified it to be against individuals. In a corrupt system, no one participating is good, there are only lesser evils
“leftist theory” being “about not seeing the world in black and white”, is the most vibes-ass description of a thing i’ve read in a while. you’re not describing “leftist theory”, you seem to be trying to talk the general concept of learning and understanding the world around you, and you’re getting that worryingly wrong too.
The point of trying to understand the world around you is not actually to maximize the amount of information you understand. The point of seeking knowledge is to try to make your understanding of the world more accurate, and in particular, to improve yourself to be more effective at making the world a better place. The reason why we identify and explore the nuances of all these systems of power is to arrive at conclusions, and refine those conclusions in light of new information.
The reason why it’s important to identify the limits of our understanding may be so we don’t plant our feet on shaky ground, but equally importantly, to identify strong principles upon which we can stand firm, because you can’t begin trying to make the world a better place without committing to some concrete understanding of what “better” is. Nuance does not exist to be your personal excuse generator to avoid ideological commitment.
If you look at the general pattern of “when people analyze the world around them, their understanding of things often becomes more complex and nuanced” and conclude “complicated things are more correct than simple things”, then congratulations, you’ve disguised a heuristic as knowledge, you’ve replaced reasoning with gradient descent, you have restructured your cognition to resemble the functioning of ChatGPT. I promise you, you do actually have the capacity to think, and you are actually supposed to use that capacity.
Thank you for all the explanations and discussions, guys, seriously. This was exactly what I hoped to achieve with this comment. I also learned quite a few things myself and changed my attitude towards the slogan ACAB.
And to those who commented the less helpful stuff: I don’t know what you were hoping to achieve, but I wish you that you got out of it what you wanted.
alice
god damn did i misread your overall attitude lol. imagine how apropos my reply would be if u were actually a deeply incurious asshole though. uh… yeah, sorry about that. i do think it’s worth questioning the premise that “not seeing the world in black and white” is a particular trait of leftist thought and not just a generalization about what happens when people engage intellectually, and it’s worth considering that sometimes clarity is about revealing hidden complexity and sometimes it’s about tearing down obfuscation. but… idk, i guess if you want to u can read my comment like u overheard me saying it to a real fuckin piece of work who, critically, isn’t actually you
Differentiator
That explains your first comment quite well 😀 tbf I could have worded my first comment more as a question and less provocative. No harm done 🙂
Of course, seeking clarity instead of categorisation isn’t inherently left behaviour, but I do believe that a) the (alt-)right tend to engage in it less, up to outright refusal from many. At the same time, many who call themselves left seem to resort to that simplicity when it is convenient. I thought ACAB was an example of that, and I even remember looking into it at one point, but apparently, my research was flawed. I’m glad my stupid provocative comment could resolve that, if anything^^ coincidentally, that’s also where my username stems from – the need to seek clarity by going beyond black and white, with my name serving as a constant reminder that I want to keep asking questions. I do suck at asking them nicely, though XP
alice
this is just a side effect of dog whistle politics, and me having bad impulse control. but i don’t think u need to deprecate yourself for happening to trigger my “committed centrist” detector by random chance, i have to take responsibility for not getting so mad on such shaky grounds. i’m gonna go ahead and turn my ublock origin filter back on that hides the dumbingofage comments section, because there’s something about this specific space that brings out the worst in me.
The thing is good cops don’t last while the bad apples get protected and moved around where they can then go on to infect other precincts. The term “a few bad apples” gets simplified to saying “but the rest are good,” and not “spoils the whole barrel.” The problem is that too many bad cops get essentially rewarded for being bad cops, or at least passive permission, while those who want to change the system are either ignored, corrupted, fired, or left to fend for themselves in a dangerous environment and then killed by criminals, if not taken out back and given the Ol’ Yeller treatment. And any attempt to reform the department is treated as if you were slitting the throat of justice. So yeah, ACAB until the system is fixed.
Raidah: “You want to become President again. You’ll be a war crim-“
Dorothy: “Oh fuck you Raidah! Your stupid attitude is why nothing changes!! I will be elected President, and I will the Abraham Lincoln of ending American war crimes, just as I was the Abraham Lincoln of making Joyce cum!!”
Raidah: “ . . . What was that last one?”
Dorothy: “I mean, making Joyce . . . come . . . to a protest with me! . . . I have to go!”
Or perhaps we could recommend a theorist for the Jewish girl who isn’t reprehensibly antisemitic
C.T Phipps
I don’t believe Dorothy is Jewish.
Dot
I can’t recall which of her parents is Jewish but I assume it’s her mother since Keener isn’t a Jewish surname. Jewishness is matrilineally inherited per Jewish law.
Also I’m very sure she’s described herself as Jewish before.
Bogeywoman
Her dad’s side is Jewish and Catholic, her mum’s is Catholic
Nymph
She has absolutely described herself as Jewish repeatedly, and Willis showed an unused strip where they almost wrote Dorothy had attended Hebrew school before deciding against it. She also (see one of the links before) has been on the receiving end of antisemitism already, so I’m not sure where people’s disconnect is coming from.
Dorothy is Jewish by her own admission and by her lived experiences. This is not a thing it’s reasonable to debate (agreeing with you, Dot).
Dot
And additionally, the most important piece of evidence that Dorothy is Jewish: Joyce is into her.
Dorothy (I think) was born Jewish, raised Catholic, and believes in atheism. I don’t remember which comic she mentions it, but she does. Something about Amazi-Girl asking her if being a superhero was appropriation because superheroes are a Jewish invention?
Dot
Religion doesn’t come into what I’m talking about here.
Literally referred to her grandmother as “my bubbe” in a fairly recent strip. That’s Yiddish. So yeah.
Also: probably should recommend theorists who aren’t virulently antisemitic for everyone! Or at least warn people, because boy is it depressingly common.
On top of the other reasons for favouring theorists who aren’t virulently antisemitic: if someone’s thinking is so flawed that they’re willing to apply broad stereotypes to people based simply on who their possibly-distant ancestors were, they might not be particularly good with nuanced reasoning.
Admittedly, I haven’t read Bakunin’s work, so this is more of a general statement.
Li
A lot of theorists are right about one thing (capitalism) while being incredibly wrong about other things (“women” and “other races” being incredibly common areas).
Ignoring or whitewashing the parts where a given theorist said and believed shitty bigoted things causes all kinds of problems, like having an unrealistically rosy image of the past, or increasing inclination to excuse these aspects as “products of the time”.
Like. No. Don’t excuse, don’t whitewash. Call it out. Put it in context: HP Lovecraft was for example a foundational horror author while also being incredibly racist, and not just virulently racist “by modern standards” but by the standards of his own time! He was UNUSUALLY awful! People KNEW he was unusually awful! That’s worth drawing attention to and warning for, especially warning Jewish readers and readers of color.
deliverything
Once again, late to respond (partly because I wasn’t sure how to phrase this, and the next strip was already up when I saw the above comment), but… certainly, it’s possible for someone who’s very wrong about some things to still have valid insights on others.
I was just saying that, however useful their works may be, it’s often necessary to keep in mind the potential for flaws in their philosophy resulting from them regarding certain things as irrelevant when they really, really aren’t.
I mean… there could, as a hypothetical example, be a society which is scrupulous about providing for the needs of all their citizens and adequately supporting even their most vulnerable, but do so by horribly abusing the non-citizens they keep as slaves. There may be worthwhile lessons in how they treat the former, but it’s necessary to keep in mind their treatment of the latter when interpreting those lessons.
Dante
It’s a good point and I’ll take it. I was thinking of “God and the State” as a text that mainly deals with what Authority is on itself, but I always assume there’s at least ONE major thing I’ll disagree on with the philosophers I drink from. The antisemitism in this case, and it does merit a CW.
Bogeywoman
With the overarching themes of the comic, I’m handing her Emma Goldman
Bogeywoman
– religion as a means of control
– violence as a means of resistance
– pro-contraception
– feminist (and pro-free love)
– vocal supporter or LGBT people
Dante
You’re so. incredibly. cool.
Thank you, you’re super right, this is a far better pick 8DD
423 thoughts on “Protecting”
NGPZ
yeah Dorothy ACAB
TOOK YA LONG ENOUGH
Kyulen
I don’t think she’s quite there yet, but she’s getting close. I hope Dorothy finds the time to read some leftist political theory soon.
C.T Phipps
It’s a step up that she’s no longer focused on lesbian feels at the protest of the genocide.
But still not focused on the genocide.
Differentiator
I find it peculiar that while much of leftist theory is about not seeing the world in black and white, attitudes like ACAB still persist.
FaerwenOfValenwood
lol
Jallorn
The struggle of any complex ideas (and given the complexity of the world, any ideas worth a damn are complex) is that core concepts can often end up being ripped from context and simplified. Even very smart and wise people have trouble not doing this- the complexities are so numerous that it is impossible for any one person to keep it all straight all the time. At least, I’ve never met one who I thought could, and even if I did, I’d never tell them so, because I think the moment you think you are such a person you cease to have any chance of being so.
Proxiehunter
Is there a cop out there who will refuse to evict anyone? Who will leave a homeless person who’s not hurting anyone alone? The law requires anyone who enforces it to do things that make them a bastard. Someone else who’s not currently up at three in the morning is likely to be able to expand on this betted.
Amber
lmao
GreyICE
ACAB is not about each individual cop being a bastard, it’s about cops being part of a system that forces them to be bastards. Imagine if you will a hypothetical “good” SS officer. They would still be forced to take part in all the things the SS officers do, and thus would no longer be good, or no longer be an SS officer.
Policing in America is a less extreme variant of this. “The Thin Blue Line” exists to protect extremist cop behavior, and cops who don’t toe the line are penalized. For instance a cop who stopped another cop from strangling someone was fired and charged. A cop who tried to report on police abuses in NYC was forceably imprisoned in a mental institution. A cop who tried to stop a suicidal person without killing them was charged with “endangering police officers.”
There are plenty of small towns in America with 2-4 cops, perhaps many of them have reasonable police officers who want to help the community. And that’s great for them (plenty also do not, or have a very interesting definition of community). But for large police forces, if you don’t toe the thin blue line, you’re not allowed to be a cop. And that means that all of those cops are bastards, whether they started out wishing to be or not.
Sharizard
Excellent explanation. Thank you very much.
Zaxares
Thanks for this explanation. It was really enlightening. 🙂 That said, we should probably rename the expression ACAB (along with “defund the police”) because on first glance it is REALLY misleading and is probably costing us support from neutral or uninformed people who read the abbreviation and draw an utterly incorrect (but nonetheless quite understandable) conclusion from it.
Hat
Zaxares, pretty much every progressive idea is twisted by bad actors.
“Black Lives Matter,” a pretty benign statement when you think about it, became some horribly controversial thing
“Woke,” was literally just “aware of systemic issues in society”, and is now meant to be anything conservatives don’t like.
“DEI” is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. All good things.
Hell, “Feminism” is treated as some kind of matriarchal, man-hating club
They aren’t confused as to what the words mean. They actively fight to twist the words.
Tequila Mockingbird
There are well-meaning people who do misunderstand, but you’re right; they often misunderstand because bad actors intentionally muddy the waters. The bad guys know the longer we have to explain and defend ourselves, the more time they have to rob us blind (of money, of rights, of infrastructure, etc.)
thejeff
Sure, but we don’t need to make it easier for them. They can and will twist anything we say, but we don’t need to make it easier for them. Things like “defund the police” that are already misleading on first glance don’t help anyone.
Taffy
What’s misleading about that?
AK
The fact that no one who wants to do it actually wants to do the thing everyone who first hears it assumes the sentence means? Like if your slogan needs explaining while making people think they know what you’re about it’s not a great slogan, and “defund the police” did damage to progressives with black and brown communities specifically in addition to being weaponized by the right.
Messaging does matter. That piece is particularly ineffective.
Sharizard
There are plenty of people out there who still see the police system overall as a force of good. Think the older generations and just generally people who don’t majorly focus on the news cycles and aren’t regularly seeing all the evidence against the police. To these people, ‘Defund the police’ may seem like either a really dumb idea, or something insidious.
You want your slogan to make sense to someone who’s mostly clueless as to what’s going on, otherwise you’re just preaching to your choir. Random spitballing but something like ‘Policing Must Change’ or ‘Police Justice, Not Police Brutality’ would at least make it clearer that you’re not seeking to weaken the notions of security that people see the police as safeguarding.
Hampsterpig
I will not disagree with your intent but a significant issue is getting clear messaging across. In the age of hashtags and slogans repeated 1000 times a minute in your media feeds, it’s difficult to get someone to read a 3 paragraph explanation of a political idea.
Take “Make America Great Again.” What does that mean exactly? It’s a nice phrase, but doesn’t say much. Now people might look into what the message means, or maybe just take it at its face value in blind support.
All Cops Are Bastards operates by the same rule. For a lot of people, that base idea resonates. For others, they may look into what that phrase actually means. The important bit is people hear the slogan and get interested enough to learn more. For that you need a bold statement to catch people’s attention in the barrage of messaging that is modern social media.
Basically, ACAB fits on a signboard, and anyone seeing that signboard might look it up and then get the actual message you replied to. Another timely example is “From the river to the sea.” I heard people chanting that and then looked it up.
Li
Not interested in going through all the effort of creating new terms that will only be immediately twisted again, as Hat noted.
It’s also just much better to explain to people that the right misrepresents terms, so that they’ll learn to be more skeptical of right-wing definitions, than to capitulate to the right’s deliberately misleading definitions — not only legitimizing their definitions but their tactics.
Not to mention constantly playing defense and spending all our time trying to come up with new terms to describe things, instead of actually making any progress on these conversations.
Stephen Bierce
Heck, the “Mayberry” paradigm of a peaceable kingdom small town with a token police department was considered a fantasy even back when it was made–especially in the face of the real Jim Crow South. I won’t name a name, but near where I was living a few years ago, there is a notorious state line town where the Sheriff just had a few above-board officers under his command, but was also in with the local organized crime families, who could loan him thugs to handle the Sheriff’s dirty work. The Sheriff finally got busted, but it’s been impossible to replace both him and his Deputies as there aren’t a lot of local men qualified for the jobs. And if you’re a GOOD man, why would you WANT to be a cop in a place like that?
Meagan
What your comment brings to mind is how people in these positions can have opportunities to do good, and these probably go unnoticed by history. For example in the movie JoJo Rabbit (spoiler ahead)
we see someone in the German military who has clearly become disillusioned with Hitler step into a situation in a way that saves multiple lives – and he’s not found out by his peers, thankfully. Then again near the end of the movie, he takes action to protect someone more innocent than him and sacrifices himself in the process (or at least doesn’t try to help his situation).
No one is morally pure and I personally couldn’t stand the assaults on my integrity that I’m sure being a police officer would present while trying to do any good in that positions. But if a saying that is supposed to be a systemic critique and people consistently misunderstand it, I want better slogans that don’t just drive culture wars.
Meagan
I missed articulating one of my main points, which is that sometimes people in the most morally compromised positions can also take actions that no one else could for good.
Willoughby Chase
Bad example.
SS recruits were chosen because they were anti-semitic thugs.
One of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen held two PhDs
Allen Alberti
I find it peculiar that while much of leftist theory is about not seeing the world in black and white, attitudes like the sky is blue still persist.
Hexx
Because Police are mandated to be suspicious of everything, even innocuous or innocent actions made with nervousness. In Short, All cops are bastards because they are paid to be whether they want to or not. Even the so called “good ones”?
someone
There are always going to be evil people out there. They don’t need to be many to ruin everything for everyone. You know the saying about how a rotten apple spoils the bunch? Once rot appears, it propagates fast.
Evil people will set up to rule over other people. Criminal behavior of coercion, extortion, even abduction and enslavement appear spontaneously. With more people under their sway, they go out to use their force to enslave even more people, until they run out of free people nearby and at that point they go raid other criminal lords.
This is basically how the ancestors of nation states appeared. People took power by force and fought other of their ilk over who would get to oppress the most people.
Once you get to rule over a lot of people, however, power can no longer be exercised directly. You need to delegate, to have intermediaries, lieutenants, etc. That’s where a need to have some sort of legitimacy comes into play, and that’s where we have a long list of thinkers who came up with differences between a just ruler and an unjust one, and of better ways to reprogram the criminal racketeering and enslaving enterprise that was at the origin of the state into something that will benefit the people instead of oppress them.
But despite many revolutions and enlightened ideals, this was never fully achieved. The state is still, at its core, a machine of oppression that we have to tolerate mostly because it protects us from worse oppression.
Nowadays, it is harder for an evil man with ambitions to just take over a tribe and then snowball from there. Precisely because there are those states out there. So you can either work within the system (join the state), or against the system (join organized crime), or both at once (be a corrupt member the state).
And this is where ACAB comes from. It’s not about each and every single member of the police being a bad person; it’s about the entire system being bad — at best, a necessary evil; at worst, just an evil.
There’s a big show being made of how police and military should not obey illegitimate orders. How the “just following orders” excuse famously didn’t fly in the Nuremberg trials. And yet, can’t you think of some recent illegitimate orders being passed, and dutifully obeyed without complaint? Can’t you think of how people who are supposed to swear an oath to protect the Constitution are allowing blatantly unconstitutional things to happen because they’re just following orders?
asmodai27
That is the exact problem with the wording ACAB: it appears to place the blame on every individual cop, which makes the claim and the views behind it really easy to misunderstand.
People not already familiar with the more nuanced interpretation don’t get it, and often oppose the oversimplified wording rather than the actual ideas, as illustrated by Differentiator’s message.
Xujhan
Alas, the effectiveness of a slogan tends to be inversely proportional to how accurately it reflects reality. “Refocus police efforts on local care and train officers to be social workers first, crime-fighters second” doesn’t really get people fired up to go and protest, even if it’s what’s actually needed. One *hopes* that the people shouting ACAB understand this, although I’ve been on the internet long enough to become rather cynical about that.
thejeff
But what does “effectiveness of a slogan” really mean? If it gets those who understand it fired up to go protest, but drives a bigger backlash from those who take it more literally, is that really effective?
Big Z
Don’t forget, when calculating that, the fact that the right wing will deliberately twist the meanings of any and all slogans no matter how innocuous — see Hat’s post above, but witness how “Black Lives Matter” is treated basically like a scam, a racist anti-white argument, and a violent anti-cop slogan all at once.
In other words, when the backlash is artificial and will exist no matter what slogan you use, why even consider it?
Li
As I said above: it’s both a waste of time and effort to constantly reinvent new terms that the right is just gonna twist again and actively counterproductive to concede that a given term was “bad”.
It legitimizes the tactic.
And it does nothing to increase wariness around right wing twisting.
Much better investment of time to raise awareness of how the right keeps twisting terms so that people are more prepared for the next twist.
Opus the Poet
Just a reminder that the movie Serpico was a dramatization of the true story of my addled mind wants to say Frank Serpico’s battle against dirty cops. Lemme Google that first name. Googled and corrected. He even took “friendly” fire during a drug raid.
Meagan
Or people get on board with the non systemic interpretation of it and focus their energy on hatred for individual cops rather than changing and improving the system that leads to the critique.
Mr D
I’ve found that thoughts on cops and their ilk is a lot more broad outside of the US.
For example, in my home country, Cops are mostly respected and trusted to do the right thing (because there are systems that actually sack and remove the pension of cops that break the code of conduct), while it is the Military that is hated and distrusted. And that comes from the simple fact that my homecountry was under a military dictatorship for 30 years.
The same talking points about cops being jackbooted thugs of the state that exist only to be the boot on the neck of the people are directed towards the Military, because it was them who did that, and not even under a veneer of “Law and Justice”, but because the Generalissimo demanded it.
MyBlueBox
In the words of Brennan Lee Mulligan:
“Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just a promise of violence that’s enacted and police are basically an occupying army, ya know what I mean?”
Which is to say ACAB is true because the institution of a police force – especially nowadays – is there to protect and serve the interests of the ruling classes, rather than protect and serve the interests of the people.
Anon
Unfortunately good cops just don’t last. They either get pulled to the bad side, or fired, or driven to suicide. The system of cops is an always has been corrupt and harmful. Link below is written by an ex-cop who is in hiding due to fear of doxxing and retaliation. He explains it very well.
https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759
Li
This.
We know ACAB, because non-bastard cops tell us so. After they’ve been kicked out!
Mustachio
Bingo.
albi
lmao, even
spriteless aunty
Look, not all cops are literally bastards, but when dealing with cops doing copper stuff it’s safest to assume they will make the bastardest choice.
bridgebrain
Its along the same line as “no ethical consumption in capitalism”, but people have oversimplified it to be against individuals. In a corrupt system, no one participating is good, there are only lesser evils
alice
“leftist theory” being “about not seeing the world in black and white”, is the most vibes-ass description of a thing i’ve read in a while. you’re not describing “leftist theory”, you seem to be trying to talk the general concept of learning and understanding the world around you, and you’re getting that worryingly wrong too.
The point of trying to understand the world around you is not actually to maximize the amount of information you understand. The point of seeking knowledge is to try to make your understanding of the world more accurate, and in particular, to improve yourself to be more effective at making the world a better place. The reason why we identify and explore the nuances of all these systems of power is to arrive at conclusions, and refine those conclusions in light of new information.
The reason why it’s important to identify the limits of our understanding may be so we don’t plant our feet on shaky ground, but equally importantly, to identify strong principles upon which we can stand firm, because you can’t begin trying to make the world a better place without committing to some concrete understanding of what “better” is. Nuance does not exist to be your personal excuse generator to avoid ideological commitment.
If you look at the general pattern of “when people analyze the world around them, their understanding of things often becomes more complex and nuanced” and conclude “complicated things are more correct than simple things”, then congratulations, you’ve disguised a heuristic as knowledge, you’ve replaced reasoning with gradient descent, you have restructured your cognition to resemble the functioning of ChatGPT. I promise you, you do actually have the capacity to think, and you are actually supposed to use that capacity.
Differentiator
Thank you for all the explanations and discussions, guys, seriously. This was exactly what I hoped to achieve with this comment. I also learned quite a few things myself and changed my attitude towards the slogan ACAB.
And to those who commented the less helpful stuff: I don’t know what you were hoping to achieve, but I wish you that you got out of it what you wanted.
alice
god damn did i misread your overall attitude lol. imagine how apropos my reply would be if u were actually a deeply incurious asshole though. uh… yeah, sorry about that. i do think it’s worth questioning the premise that “not seeing the world in black and white” is a particular trait of leftist thought and not just a generalization about what happens when people engage intellectually, and it’s worth considering that sometimes clarity is about revealing hidden complexity and sometimes it’s about tearing down obfuscation. but… idk, i guess if you want to u can read my comment like u overheard me saying it to a real fuckin piece of work who, critically, isn’t actually you
Differentiator
That explains your first comment quite well 😀 tbf I could have worded my first comment more as a question and less provocative. No harm done 🙂
Of course, seeking clarity instead of categorisation isn’t inherently left behaviour, but I do believe that a) the (alt-)right tend to engage in it less, up to outright refusal from many. At the same time, many who call themselves left seem to resort to that simplicity when it is convenient. I thought ACAB was an example of that, and I even remember looking into it at one point, but apparently, my research was flawed. I’m glad my stupid provocative comment could resolve that, if anything^^ coincidentally, that’s also where my username stems from – the need to seek clarity by going beyond black and white, with my name serving as a constant reminder that I want to keep asking questions. I do suck at asking them nicely, though XP
alice
this is just a side effect of dog whistle politics, and me having bad impulse control. but i don’t think u need to deprecate yourself for happening to trigger my “committed centrist” detector by random chance, i have to take responsibility for not getting so mad on such shaky grounds. i’m gonna go ahead and turn my ublock origin filter back on that hides the dumbingofage comments section, because there’s something about this specific space that brings out the worst in me.
Renadt
The thing is good cops don’t last while the bad apples get protected and moved around where they can then go on to infect other precincts. The term “a few bad apples” gets simplified to saying “but the rest are good,” and not “spoils the whole barrel.” The problem is that too many bad cops get essentially rewarded for being bad cops, or at least passive permission, while those who want to change the system are either ignored, corrupted, fired, or left to fend for themselves in a dangerous environment and then killed by criminals, if not taken out back and given the Ol’ Yeller treatment. And any attempt to reform the department is treated as if you were slitting the throat of justice. So yeah, ACAB until the system is fixed.
The Queer Agenda [frog memes]
DOROTHY is evolving!
(We hope.)
Amós Batista
The first comment, like a thrown stone.
NGPZ
what I wanna know is why nobody here but me seems to be talking about DINA PLUSH :0
Lilith Rose
Dorothy… your problem wasn’t setting your aspirations too high, it was setting them to be too low.
Why be president when you can be one of the rebel founders bringing forth a new nation?
Reflex76
Raidah: “You want to become President again. You’ll be a war crim-“
Dorothy: “Oh fuck you Raidah! Your stupid attitude is why nothing changes!! I will be elected President, and I will the Abraham Lincoln of ending American war crimes, just as I was the Abraham Lincoln of making Joyce cum!!”
Raidah: “ . . . What was that last one?”
Dorothy: “I mean, making Joyce . . . come . . . to a protest with me! . . . I have to go!”
BBCC
THIS!
Dot
I really don’t think the arc here is going to be “Dorothy becomes even more of an institutionalist”
Bogeywoman
“Dorothy does an anarchism” would be fun
Dante
I need her to read Bakunin so bad, truly
Dot
Or perhaps we could recommend a theorist for the Jewish girl who isn’t reprehensibly antisemitic
C.T Phipps
I don’t believe Dorothy is Jewish.
Dot
I can’t recall which of her parents is Jewish but I assume it’s her mother since Keener isn’t a Jewish surname. Jewishness is matrilineally inherited per Jewish law.
Also I’m very sure she’s described herself as Jewish before.
Bogeywoman
Her dad’s side is Jewish and Catholic, her mum’s is Catholic
Nymph
She has absolutely described herself as Jewish repeatedly, and Willis showed an unused strip where they almost wrote Dorothy had attended Hebrew school before deciding against it. She also (see one of the links before) has been on the receiving end of antisemitism already, so I’m not sure where people’s disconnect is coming from.
Dorothy is Jewish by her own admission and by her lived experiences. This is not a thing it’s reasonable to debate (agreeing with you, Dot).
Dot
And additionally, the most important piece of evidence that Dorothy is Jewish: Joyce is into her.
She has a thing for the tribe.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/04-the-bechdel-test/chaser/
TulipKitten
Dorothy (I think) was born Jewish, raised Catholic, and believes in atheism. I don’t remember which comic she mentions it, but she does. Something about Amazi-Girl asking her if being a superhero was appropriation because superheroes are a Jewish invention?
Dot
Religion doesn’t come into what I’m talking about here.
Tan
See panel 2 of https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/02-choosing-my-religion/catholic/
Li
Literally referred to her grandmother as “my bubbe” in a fairly recent strip. That’s Yiddish. So yeah.
Also: probably should recommend theorists who aren’t virulently antisemitic for everyone! Or at least warn people, because boy is it depressingly common.
Nymphie
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vacuum/provisionally/
Here she clearly calls herself jewish
deliverything
On top of the other reasons for favouring theorists who aren’t virulently antisemitic: if someone’s thinking is so flawed that they’re willing to apply broad stereotypes to people based simply on who their possibly-distant ancestors were, they might not be particularly good with nuanced reasoning.
Admittedly, I haven’t read Bakunin’s work, so this is more of a general statement.
Li
A lot of theorists are right about one thing (capitalism) while being incredibly wrong about other things (“women” and “other races” being incredibly common areas).
Ignoring or whitewashing the parts where a given theorist said and believed shitty bigoted things causes all kinds of problems, like having an unrealistically rosy image of the past, or increasing inclination to excuse these aspects as “products of the time”.
Like. No. Don’t excuse, don’t whitewash. Call it out. Put it in context: HP Lovecraft was for example a foundational horror author while also being incredibly racist, and not just virulently racist “by modern standards” but by the standards of his own time! He was UNUSUALLY awful! People KNEW he was unusually awful! That’s worth drawing attention to and warning for, especially warning Jewish readers and readers of color.
deliverything
Once again, late to respond (partly because I wasn’t sure how to phrase this, and the next strip was already up when I saw the above comment), but… certainly, it’s possible for someone who’s very wrong about some things to still have valid insights on others.
I was just saying that, however useful their works may be, it’s often necessary to keep in mind the potential for flaws in their philosophy resulting from them regarding certain things as irrelevant when they really, really aren’t.
I mean… there could, as a hypothetical example, be a society which is scrupulous about providing for the needs of all their citizens and adequately supporting even their most vulnerable, but do so by horribly abusing the non-citizens they keep as slaves. There may be worthwhile lessons in how they treat the former, but it’s necessary to keep in mind their treatment of the latter when interpreting those lessons.
Dante
It’s a good point and I’ll take it. I was thinking of “God and the State” as a text that mainly deals with what Authority is on itself, but I always assume there’s at least ONE major thing I’ll disagree on with the philosophers I drink from. The antisemitism in this case, and it does merit a CW.
Bogeywoman
With the overarching themes of the comic, I’m handing her Emma Goldman
Bogeywoman
– religion as a means of control
– violence as a means of resistance
– pro-contraception
– feminist (and pro-free love)
– vocal supporter or LGBT people
Dante
You’re so. incredibly. cool.
Thank you, you’re super right, this is a far better pick 8DD
Kyulen
I hope she reads some Marx and Engels and Lenin soon.
C.T Phipps
Nothing says anti-cop energy like Lenin.
(anti-communist anarchist here)
Regret
When you say anti-communist, do you mean anti-authoritarian state or anti-sharing or anti-work-based-definition-of-ownership?
Because communism has a lot of different definitions, especially among those that are against it.