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.

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.

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.

I feel like slogans are strained by their multiple functions:

1. Outward facing publicization, something to chant and that represents the group’s views

2. 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?)

I am increasingly just here for the trans megathread.

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

Dividing lines is three underscores ___

Hurricane milhouse