I think we should do all of that. We do some of it now (being sentenced to complete community service is “purposeful, beneficial work”), and we also sentence a lot of people to probation, not jail.

Where I see that approach break down is when you have someone keep committing crimes, which is common in your example of domestic violence.

the real-world alternatives abolition advocates are calling for

What are you thinking of? A lot of alternatives (including de-criminalizing certain drug use, for instance) do work very well for some cases. I think the trouble starts when you ask what we should do in cases where those alternatives fail.

“Abolish ICE” is something I’d stick by. ICE didn’t exist before 2002 and it’s not as if the country was falling apart. Customs is a reasonable thing to have, but we already have Customs and Border Patrol. There are legitimate reasons you’d want to arrest and deport someone (a decent government might do so for someone wanted on an ICC warrant), but you can have the FBI do that. ICE adds nothing besides the capacity to do deportations at scale, which is a good thing to oppose.

I dont like state oppression being used against me and would like it to be used on my class enemies.

We have to stop conflating this with abolition. If I want to abolish slavery, or abolish the death penalty, it’s not that I want to be the one to decide who is subjected to those things, it’s that I don’t want anyone to be subjected to those things.

That’s abolition, everything else is a degree of reform.

Prison abolition is an example discussed in the episode. Consider the maximalist position: abolition abolition, the idea that no type of government, even one leftists control, should put people actually guilty of serious crimes in even the most humane of prisons. I don’t think rejecting that (especially as part of an immediate platform) is tailism. It’s not popular, sure, but that’s not why it should be rejected. It should be rejected because it’s a bad idea for the foreseeable future. No AES state does that, for instance. Committing to a radical idea and not shying away from it only makes sense if that radical idea is a good one in the first place.

And even if you disagree with that entire paragraph, we have to be able to talk about it among people broadly to the left of the Democratic Party without rapidly descending to insults. I sometimes see the approach of jumping straight to berating people if they don’t immediately agree. There’s some value to that approach with actual reactionaries, but if we apply it even to people who see Democrats as right wing we’re well on the road to “too small and unpopular to accomplish anything.” At some point you have to go through the effort of trying to convince someone you’re right.

Even successful movements are open to criticism, and the 2020-era movement was a lot less successful than anyone here would have liked.

You don’t want to just do tailism, but you also don’t want to be so far from the masses that you remain too small and unpopular to accomplish anything. There has to be a way to talk about striking this balance.

A lot of suicide attempts are hesitant, right?

Or maybe they just wanted to go for a nice dip

That logic is sound enough. Any large movement will involve compromise.

Where it breaks down is when they attempt to later brow-beat the left with the exact opposite argument. “The swing voter may literally vote for Trump if you don’t compromise, but you can’t similarly threaten to withhold your vote otherwise you’re basically voting for Trump.” And that’s not even getting into what they want to “compromise” on.

Threatening to withhold votes over an issue is a tactic that’s been proven successful. It been no small part of dragging the Republican Party right. They just don’t want us to do it.

Need more 9/11 content on here, lest we forget

Prometheus? What ever happened to that guy?

You’re telling me your idea of prison abolition involves building nicer prisons. You really don’t see how that’s going to confuse people?

Calling that “abolition” strikes me as a really poor way to communicate a good idea, especially in an environment where one of the main criticisms of AES states is “this is just a dictatorship with red aesthetics.” You immediately have to explain to people that you don’t mean abolish abolish, and it will feel like a bait-and-switch. I think a lot of self-described abolitionists would strongly disagree with defining abolition that way, too.

When people talk about abolishing the death penalty, they don’t mean making executions fair and humane, they mean no more executions. Same for abolishing slavery: see all the leftist criticism of the 13th amendment’s carve out for prisons. We should either mean it or say something more precise.

Again, if you would actually read my comments (none of you do)

We really have to do away with “the only way you could possibly disagree with me is if you didn’t read my comment, or are just otherwise ignorant.” I read what you wrote, I just think you’re wrong.

This isn’t bad, but you need some way to predict what people will do in the future. Will the stick by what they said they’ll do, or backtrack when it comes time to take action? If something new comes up, or some background issue springs to the foreground, how will they respond?

This post and the comments in here are made for the purpose of equating ALL criticism with the wrong type of criticism.

When the post begins with “I’m not saying you shouldn’t criticize Zohran or the DSA,” I don’t think it’s intended as this sort of sleight-of-hand.

There’s a difference between swimming upstream and swimming downstream, but there’s also a lot of logic to the idea that doing something unpopular doesn’t immediately (or automatically) get you removed from office, and requires effort to stop.

There are also the questions of what you do if they leave, and what you do if they leave and commit another serious crime.

Is it post-abolition if you’re restricting someone’s rights and confining them to a building, even if you do so in the most humane possible way?

I would say no. I think it does us no favors to talk in terms of abolition and then describe what is at bottom a very nice prison.

You seem to be convinced that there’s some magically bad crime that would make me turn on a dime and say, “oh, of course, those people should be tortured forever.”

I haven’t said anything like that. I began my last comment by agreeing with every single prison reform you listed. I’m going to disengage now.

I agree that a lot of people commit crimes in the U.S. because their basic human needs (including mental health resources) go unaddressed. The best way to reduce crime is making sure everyone has housing, education, employment, healthcare – all the stuff any socialist state would do its best to guarantee.

But people without acute mental health issues also commit crimes, and not everyone who has an acute mental health issue will voluntarily engage in treatment. And even if a revolution won total victory tomorrow, society won’t change overnight. I’m reading Justice in Moscow, by George Feifer. It was published in 1964 and written based on observations from Soviet courtrooms around that time. There were still “real crimes” committed there, as there are in China today.