Comment on Cop busted for unauthorized use of Clearview AI facial recognition resigns
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months agoDefund means to essentially get rid of a department or thing. The phrase “defend the police” means “get rid of the police”. It doesn’t matter if there’s some cartoon to re-explain away the phrase or a bunch of other people trying to re-define the English language. English is English, and words have meaning.
The “defund the police” movement failed because us liberals don’t fucking understand marketing. Like, at all. I can’t count the number of times some liberal movement crops up with their slogan and Republicans turn that slogan against them because nobody spent the ten minutes time to think about how that phrase or thing could be abused. For example, that brief time when the LGBT movement wanted to rename themselves to LGBTQIA2SUVWTFBBQ? Seriously?!?
It’s like naming your baby “Assman McAssface” and wondering why he gets bullied in school.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 5 months ago
I have a private theory, for which I have absolutely 0 evidence, that the forces of the establishment have some way of sneaking stupid unpopular things or phrases into the left’s discourse which the left then seizes and runs with, much to the establishments’s delight. E.g. renaming the Green Party the Green-Rainbow Party, climate activists attacking famous artworks, things like that.
I have 0 evidence for this, as applied to “defund the police” or anything else. Actually I sort of suspect that “defund the police” was an original creation of the ACAB contingent which meant exactly what it sounds like, that got retconned by more sensible but still reform-minded people into meaning “more properly fund everything else” for exactly the reasons we’re discussing. But as a general rule I suspect (again, with 0 evidence) that some of what you’re talking about actually comes from deliberate sabotage.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Some of the more extreme-minded liberals do a good enough job at sabotaging themselves and the movements they are a part of, without the need for malicious saboteurs. Like Atheist+ or progressive stack.
Then again, Russians orgs are out there, trying to influence politic movements and sabotage others. GamerGate was an entire sea of political actors, journalists, influencers, and Russian agents, trying to push their own narratives to the point of mass disinformation from both sides, with the general public on either side confused and angry at the other’s responses.