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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31010 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat

I don't think your views on crime, though I personally wouldn't subscribe to all of them, are at all in tension with social democracy, indeed if one considers policing to be a public service which it surely is, then ample police funding is surely the 'more' social democratic perspective. Hence why in Britain, where policing has not been caught up in culture wars as it has in the US, even Corbyn attacked the Tories for cutting police funding.

Those views fall outside of Sociel Democracy as practiced as a social scene, wherein all cops are bastards etcetera.

That's not really social democracy, as commonly understood, anywhere.

Or that there's a perception police in th UK spend more time policing people saying mean things to or about alphabet people on the internet than investigating and disrupting asian grooming gangs raping kids.

This is just not the case. Every now and again such a case (like the recent gollywogs one) will come around and the usual suspects will have a (sometimes justified) moan, but when Starmer or whoever talks about crime they always focus on the impact of austerity on serious crimes.

Isn't that the only positive narrative available?

If he talked about austerity impacting officers assigned to police alphabet internet mean words or not having sufficient officers to raid a pub to remove offensive dolls, that's not really a narrative that is going to perform well.

5 police seized 15 dolls from the pub in Essex. That doesn't sound like an under-resourced force. If that was the best use of officers on that day I would think there is no serious crime in Essex.

The big upending of the British legal system over the past few years has been dedicated to sending police to harass otherwise law-abiding citizens for activities such as organising a judo class for children and having a coffee while walking with a friend. It's not merely a funding thing. There are obvious incentives for police to harass the harmless rather than confront the difficult and dangerous, and the UK is already long down the road of anarcho-tyranny.

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