So why do most of you guys hate them? Legitimately interested. I doubt it's the typical "down with authority, man!", but more grounded in the police mostly existing to protect private and state interests than caring about most citizen's well-being. However, you can't be against enforcing safety, can you? Open to hear your reasoning.
Cops
Adam Wilson
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Parker Gutierrez
Read Foucault.
Elijah Reyes
Easily one of the worst posters on this board
Anthony Peterson
k
Jaxon Allen
I might, if you tell me what I should read from him and why!
Noah Baker
I don't hate police as people. However, it's important to understand that the police are the feudal lord's men at arms transferred to capitalist society. They exist to protect the interests of the bourgeoisie. No doubt many of them actually think they protect and serve the people. They need to enforce safety because the system they serve produces it. It really makes no sense except from a safety perspective.
Brody Brown
Disregard "except" in this post.
Cooper Smith
Copypasta from an earlier post I made (asking you to read discipline & punish: birth of the prison system):
If you go into Discipline & Punish thinking it is a discussion of freedom in society, or how free you are in society, the very first sentence is going to disabuse you of that notion "On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned 'to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris', where he was to be 'taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax, weighing two pounds'; then, 'in the said cart, to the Place de Greve, where on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulfur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds'.
These were the good-old days when the power that was wielded was more explicit. New disciplinary forms of power however operate surreptitiously, wherein one doesn't, or perhaps cannot, notice which ways one is influenced. In a way, this thinking is dangerous because it's easy to identify the source of power when looking at a model of sovereignty or a spectacle of punishment; it's easy to say 'that's the source of my alienation; let's just get rid of the king.' The point is, here, to talk about the transition of a system of punishment before the French revolution. The system of punishment that existed was such that the sovereign would extract some sort of justice, or retribution, on the body of the criminal, done publicly as an expression of power, and with the complicity of the public. Foucault is not interested in notions of human nature, and universal rights, justice, humanism, objective truth, et c, and was instead obsessed with the dominance of power, the central theme of his work. Foucault is against this very idea of painting the above as savages, and then we got the notion of human rights, we had great reformers like Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, et al. who argued that we should punish more humanely, the sovereign lost power, and everybody was happy. He does concede, fundamentally, that there was a change in the form of the state apparatus, but rather that the sublation of so-called "rights" obscures how efficient the system actually is—that power is still exerted by the state, just in more subtle ways. Particularly, the old system was becoming more dangerous for the sovereign, and Foucault emphasizes this by talking about the ways in which things can go wrong, and how a crowd can end up sympathizing with the condemned body being humiliated, tortured, or executed. The genealogy of the new system however depends a lot on the development of a mercantilist economy and other elements in the social order, an appeal to markets and ideological diffusion, that make discipline a more palatable form of control.
tl;dr when you ask if we're against safety, you should also ask who it is we're safe from. Your answer will reveal more about you than your fears of disorder. I would take the radically pessimistic view that we aren't free from each other: hell is other people, that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves.
Gabriel Roberts
The police are a widespread taskforce of legalized thugs, regardless of whether or not some individual ones are nice. There's a protest, they're the ones who crack down. There's bourgs who need protecting, they're the ones who guard them. And when we've got a revolution to fight for, the police will be the first obstacle we have to overcome. They will destroy us, or we will destroy them. There's no alternative options. They exist to defend the status-quo and define the boundaries of bourgeois legality.
Do we have to enjoy that conflict? Not necessarily. But it must be done nonetheless.
Good post.
Nolan Rivera
Noah Long
r u actualy an anarcha feminist or is the flag for aesthetic/shitposting purposes?
Tyler Cox
Where did the quote end?
Anthony Collins
Idpol has taken the board
Sebastian Collins
This.
That post had zero idpol in it tho.
Jose Sanchez
Toppest of keks
Jace Mitchell
pls fam
Elijah Carter
The police force are state apparatus and must be turned against the ruling class or smashed, only to be replaced and wither away.
If we can gain any policemen to our cause, brilliant, otherwise we must treat them as our enemies.
Camden Rodriguez
Naturally I oppose them on the grounds that they exist to protect capitalism, but speaking for myself, fuck individual cops as well. I feel gratified when I see the police getting their shit wrecked by rioters. A good chunk of them are bullying scumbags of one form or another and the rest for the most part sit back and watch. And that's inevitable when the badge gives them a license to behave like the worst of criminals with near total impunity.
Julian Jackson
Foucault was a critic of sexual liberation and identity politics when everybody else was whining about how we are sexually repressed. I suspect your perception of him is half the retarded American college interpretation, half Holla Forums illiteracy. It's like equating Marx with either fascism or liberalism or even both which is another brilliance from America.
Read his "The Birth of Biopolitics", despite the title it actually talks about liberalism and the birth of European and American neoliberalism respectively.
Another good one is "The Punitive Society" which is about how workers are produced and controlled through disciplinary and punitive techniques (the birth of modern police is analyzed as well). It's also where he starts with the idea that we should analyze everything as civil war which is something that the left is really lacking imo.
Gabriel Adams
Read Žižek.
Andrew Fisher
Nobody hates the idea of the police, but depending on where you live it's difficult not to hate the type of shit they do and what purposes they end up serving.
Nathan Russell
Not OP, but I also have the same question. I understood your explanations, but please give some more precise example of things the police does that makes you hate them.
Evan Cruz
The police enforce the laws. And in the US, that means they are the enforcers of capitalism.
I could support a hypothetical police in a communist society, but we are far from that today. Today a cop is the most dangerous person most of us will ever come in contact with.
Aaron Stewart
This. They have power over people, and they know it. The arrogance and power-tripping that comes off them is just infuriating.
Cooper Miller
Since when was Foucault idpol? His work is a little pretentious but can be helpful.
His notions of societal power only became "boo hoo muh muh privilege" when swaths of sophomoric hacks in universities started toying with them.
Ian Thompson
I don't hate cops. I hate what they are used for. Many of my friends are cops and they legitimately are out to keep people safe and shit. More than once they've pulled over a guy that was about to ruin his parole and instead of fucking him over, gave him a ride back to their house and shit. Cops like these are few in number, but I think this is what they should strive for. Of course, my buddies have also seen that the system itself is rotten. We can have policing, but it must be a civil service, not a pseudo-soldier bullshit.
Ryan Morris
buddy, how much time you got?
so how good are good cops?
also
>their only defense I've heard is le eppan 'only doing my job' maymay and its 'if you want me to stop being a sadistic asshole you need to change the rigged system by doing something we know how to deal with and effectively neuter working within it lol' variant, and those cut about as much ice with me as it did as a defense at Nuremburg preemptive blow it out your ass to the guy about to say I'm craftyjew.jpg for not denying the Holocaust
>'he barked, that means he consents smells drugs' again, another shit-tier argument that was worn out in this case by dogmonglers from /zoo/ shitposting on /furry/ rather than Nazi war criminals
they have no accountability
>if one of them gets in trouble for shooting a minority in cold blood, beating up hippies slightly more than normal or probably atp probably publicly sodomizing a kitten, the media, the rightards and Holla Forumsyps will rush in to defend them, suck their cocks dry and/or jack off to it with dank meems about muh dildo puffins or muh queers cucks, assuming their paid shills fail to make that happen
Brayden Gomez
Everyone on Holla Forums does, read
Colton Reyes
They break up strikes, beats up protesters and the "undesirable", infiltrates our groups, etc. The police was invented to keep the masses from organizing because the army would either sidfe with the masses, refuse to shoot into the crowd or shooting would just make things worse.