Me: there’s a fire in my house! Please abolish it!
Fireman: Ok, we’re ready! What are you going to replace it with?
Me: what
Fireman: The fire. What are you going to replace it with? Fire has a purpose, you know, you can’t just remove it. The combustion that powers your car engine, that’s fire. And the fire in my woodstove heats my house and keeps my family warm. Fire is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, and in the correct place, at the correct time.
Me: It’s destroying my home. Please abolish it.
Fireman: Do you even know what fire is LOL fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in a self-sustaining chemical reaction, do you REALLY think you can just abolish that? Do you even know what you’re talking about?
Me: I’m fine with it existing just not in my house right now.
House: destroyed
Fireman: Why didn’t you give me a valid replacement??? We could have helped you.
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OP, when the body is taken into account you have positioned this post essentially as a leading question/rage bait. AskLemmy is intended for genuinely open-ended, thought provoking questions. For example, “What might be some viable alternatives to prison/policing”. Please update your question to be less leading and more open-ended and thought provoking.
Edit: Sigh, I tried. Not an open ended question. Locking.
“Do you support me?” cannot be polished into something thing open-ended
Why not? This thread is achieving the desired outcome; discussion about the topic, exploration of solutions and critique, and attentiveness to the issue. If you don’t like the way it’s phrased because of some arcane rule you can piss off and participate in another thread.
The difference between fire and police is that fire is unnecessary, mindless, and controlled by instinct while police always fill at least some role, are not mindless, and can be communicated with. No non-tribal nation in history has ever been without police except for when absolute chaos has broken out, not the Greeks, not the Romans, not the Japanese, not the Egyptians, not even Polynesians. Many places have had some unique kind of policing system, sometimes publicizing/privatizing/militarizing/communalizing it, but nobody has done things on a completely layperson basis. The cultural revolution had aspects related to what you’re looking for, and it ended up being the second-deadliest human tragedy of all time behind the conquests of Genghis Khan.
Your house can burn. I still use my fire properly and don’t want it gone just because you played with yours and burned your house down.
Police have become overly militarized and see the people they are supposed to assist as “the enemy”.
We need a return to community policing, where everyone in the neighborhood knows the local cop, and the local cop knows everyone.
End “Warrior Training”: (NSFW)
https://youtu.be/Wf4cea5oObY#t=11m42s
Go back to Community Policing:
https://okb.oregon.gov/Pages/community-policing-in-portland.aspx
Thank you for sharing an opposing viewpoint respectfully. I’ll check out your articles.
Do you support prison/ police abolition?
No
Correction:
“Abolish fire in my house”
“Are you sure? We can just put out the fire in the living room and you’ll still need a working boiler, cooker and oven given it’s the height of winter?”
“No; abolish fire in my house. I’ll still be able to heat my house and cook my food.”
“Ok… If you say so”
“Why is my house cold? Why is my food raw?”
This person is suggesting that if we abolish the fire that’s burning the house down, we won’t be able to heat up food or stay warm in winter.
… Which is the entire point of the post. It is literally a parody of this style of rhetoric, in which the subject of abolition is compared to something strictly necessary, and shown to be not necessary, and often harmful. I don’t know if this person struggles with reading comprehension, but they read and recited the metaphor without any comprehension of its meaning. Stay in school kids
“Abolish the fire in my house” ≠ “Put out that one fire in my house”
There’s one of us who struggles with comprehension and it’s not me
You’re arguing against my position by challenging the metaphor… by saying the two entities are not the same. Honey that’s what metaphors are used for. To compare two different things. This is tragic.
They aren’t challenging the metaphor at all with their statement. They’re showing you that the entire premise is garbage, because within your metaphor, “Abolish the fire in my house” ≠ “Put out that one fire in my house”.
The metaphor is… Ok, I guess, if not a gross oversimplification, but your post and energy in the comments just scream “debate me bro” when it doesn’t seem like you’ve got the maturity for even a normal conversation. Like you maybe just found your first Ben Shapiro video or something.
