The classic one is, of course, “ACAB,” but I’ve already gotten into these arguments so I will spare you reading too much on it. Let it suffice to say all US cops are bastards (or, you know, they serve an especially malignant bastard function), all German cops, all UK cops, etc. But, to find a diplomatic way of getting this across, the security patrols deployed by the Panthers were also cops if that word has a non-moral meaning.
I think, and this is why I even bring ACAB up, that it gives people something to rally around and maybe even encouraged them to see things differently, and they get attached to it as essentially a dogma without seeing the analysis that produced it (or justified it, in any case). The slogan becomes the analysis. It becomes what exists in place of having reasons for what you believe, even when good reasons are out there!
I don’t know how to do dividing lines
I think it’s pretty funny when some asshole chud gets fired or injured or whatever and someone comments “another kkrakkka down, unlimited genocide on the first world”. The humor comes from the absurdity, that there is no such genocide in the works and the subject in this case usually isn’t even dead. It seems like a perfectly fine meme.
So then a huge hurricane hits Florida, we have hundreds of normal, mostly poor people dying and people are saying this and, when someone goes “Hey, that’s not right” they double down. [I was busy when this was happening, this isn’t me complaining about being dog piled or whatever]
The weird thing about it is that I thought it was 100% a joke, but some people got attached to the phrase in a way that reminds me of people going “ACAB means ACAB” as though it’s anything other than an unhinged exclamation that is funny because it’s unhinged. I don’t know how this happened, but I am forced to conclude that the way the meme was treated up to this point was conditioning people in a detrimental way. Or maybe they were always bloodthirsty chauvinists, but that seems like the greater leap to me.
Of course there were a couple of pathetic, cowardly losers in the mix saying “Oh, don’t take it so seriously, it’s a shitposting site”. Those people I direct to 4chan. Antisocial behavior is antisocial behavior, and calling it meaningless to escape that it does have a meaning and that meaning is quite negative is contemptible behavior that should be rejected by the policy of any space that claims to be leftist.
Anyway, I don’t really have a call to action or anything, except perhaps: Oppose Slogan Worship.
Starting a struggle session over a non-existent problem and then being surprised people start getting contrary. This is 15th type of liberalism. Also wrecker shit, frankly.
You’re not wrong on the rest, but also this IS a shitposting site. And that’s not a defense, more of a surrender.
a non-existent problem
I saw it, the poster who started the thread saw it, and at least a few people in the thread decided that the destruction of beleaguered proletarian families is a good thing, actually, while there was divided opinion on if calling for genocide is bad, actually.
Clearly it’s not something that you noticed, but sometimes we need to acknowledge that other people notice other things.
And that’s not a defense, more of a surrender.
When an action is challenged and you respond to counter that challenge and support the challenged action being able to continue, it’s a defense, don’t give me this shit with playing word games. “Surrender” to being some discount 4chan sicko all you like, but don’t drag the rest of us down with you if the website being “leftist” means anything at all.
When an action is challenged and you respond to counter that challenge and support the challenged action being able to continue, it’s a defense, don’t give me this shit with playing word games. “Surrender” to being some discount 4chan sicko all you like, but don’t drag the rest of us down with you if the website being “leftist” means anything at all.
lol. Fine, not a defense. A condemnation.
Have we had a struggle session this week though?
I have about a dozen cops in my family. Through them I’ve known hundreds more cops who are their friends. They think I’m ideologically similar to them (clean-cut white man with a business education and respectable career and no criminal record) so I hear all sorts of insanely racist and queerphobic shit that they think is safe to say around me. I have a good poker face though. For me the ACAB slogan issue is not one of either being a general slogan I blindly follow, or coming from a personal grudge due to being caught breaking a law. For me, “ACAB” is an evidence-based conclusion with a lot of data points. I do not trust any of them to abide by their various codes of conduct when no-one’s watching. Hell, I don’t trust any of them to carry a weapon more dangerous than a water pistol. And even then they’d probably add capsacin to the water and aim for the eyes.
Notice that my problem wasn’t “Nobody thinks about the good cops in the admittedly mostly bastard cop population”, my problem was “Some people aren’t distinguishing between different bodies of cops, who will vary based on who that body serves”. I’m sure that you are right about whatever body of cops you’re talking about there and I don’t support you (or anyone) saying ACAB in reference to cops who serve socially reactionary bodies like the establishment powers of the anglosphere.
It’s just sloganeering. Like how Black Lives Matter is a slogan, not a political line about how every single Black person matter. There are plenty of Black people whose lives don’t matter at all. Easiest examples are the neocolonial puppets who sold out Africans for scraps handed out by their white neocolonial masters. But as Ture said, when the time comes, the African masses will spare them not.
This problem isn’t just a Hexbear problem since I see this all the time on Twitter. Going back to the BLM example, imagine if in the middle of a BLM protest, some pig who just so happens to be Black started doing typical pig shit and when the protestors take the appropriate measures against that pig shit, the Ben Shapiros and Tim Pools started crowing, “uh aktually, I thought you said Black lives matter, but you don’t aktually value all Black lives, only some Black lives.” The Twitter response would be to say, “uh aktually, by putting on a pig uniform, the dude is no longer Black but a [word that rhymes with racoon] and [word that rhymes with racoon]s aren’t Black because being Black is a political identity even though we have never used it as a political identity until now and using it as a political identity has unforeseen consequences that we’ll sweep under the rug and pretend aren’t there.” The response is digging the hole deeper by playing around with words instead of just abandoning sloganeering.
Once I realize this, I can see this phenomenon everywhere. People endlessly arguing about what counts as a cop because they’re attached to “ACAB” as a slogan, what counts as a prison because they’re attached to “abolish prisons” as a slogan, what counts as a “master’s tool” because they’re attached to “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” and so on.
If someone heard the slogan “peace, land, and bread” and said “but what about water? what about sex? what about pets? what about blahblahblah,” the answer isn’t tacking on more and more shit until there’s like 30+ items or to say “uh aktually, by “bread” we meant sustenance so “water” gets included under “bread.”” The answer is to say, “It’s just a slogan. But here, read this to understand what we want” and handing them a printed copy of the April Theses.
You sound like you’re more experienced with this issue than I am, but isn’t Black a political identity, like all race is?
I’m more talking about how Malcolm X would say stuff like the “Black people of Asia.” He wasn’t talking about an African diaspora in Asia or dark-skinned South Asians, but the Vietnamese and Chinese in their anti-colonial struggle. In his eyes, the Algerians, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Kenyans were all Black because they were colonized peoples struggling to free themselves from colonizers. It wasn’t about heritage or cultural affinity. I know there are some people who still use it in this political sense so you have some people who say that the East Timorese are Black because they’re a dark-skinned colonized people struggling against Indonesian settler colonialism, but it’s pretty rare nowadays.
I feel like slogans are strained by their multiple functions:
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Outward facing publicization, something to chant and that represents the group’s views
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Inward facing summary, serving to distill a hopefully well-investigated position into something applicable to the current situation
Because this kind of slogan goes hand in hand with social movements that use chanting at protests the nature of the protest should be kept in mind. These are not universal maxims and should not be the core value to base everything else on, but an abstracted outer layer, to use in the context of spreading ideas to those unfamiliar with them, while also being an accurate representation of the application of values to the current situation.
ACAB is a phrase originating in the west, to protest the hand in glove compact between police and capital. Non bastard cops can/do exist, but for a western protest in thr current moment, chant ACAB all day long. If people want to apply ACAB to security patrols outside this dynamic, it is refusing investigation of their relationship to the power structures they serve.
No investigation, no right to speak, but yeah, the exposure of many/most people to the nature of such movements begins and ends with the slogan, so I understand the need to accurately represent views may contradict the need to agitate for change in the present.
(Is this an accurate dialectic between in/out-facing functions of slogans?)
Makes sense 2 me
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I am increasingly just here for the trans megathread.
Hurricane milhouse
Dividing lines is three underscores ___
We draw the line
At taking meme phrases too seriously
ty
Online discourse rewards simple, maximalist positions, and yeah I think you’re right that there are plenty of people for whom those positions are the only foundation they have. The pandemic was quite depressing imo in how it exposed the paper-thin nature of so many people’s politics, at least on social media. Suddenly you had vocal Maoists realizing that, actually, restrictions on individual liberty are bad when they happen to them. Or people will be 100% ACAB until sex crimes are mentioned and then that all goes out the window. The ACAB Left were completely incoherent on the Lucy Letby case too, to give a more recent, concrete example. There’s no consistency to any of it, and you’ll go insane trying to make it make sense
Suddenly you had vocal Maoists realizing that, actually, restrictions on individual liberty are bad when they happen to them.
I found a lot of this thing weird. Like, I’m one of the people less affected by lockdown by virtue of my life as a shut-in, but people were getting real fucking worked-up over being told to wear a mask at the gym and other simple things like that that were in the common interest.
Yeah I felt that there were different legitimate positions one could take (I was quite pro-restrictions myself) but it was the inconsistency that pissed me off. And the mental gymnastics genuinely drove a lot of people mad imo — they were so desperate not to have their treats taken away that suddenly ‘public health’ itself was an insidious concept that serves only white supremacy etc etc, and there’s no way back from that
