fits neatly with the drum i've been banging on for years, "it's not just the incompetence and cowardice, it's not just the corruption and class interests, it is also that giant swathes of politicians are lazy as hell and simply do not want to do work of any kind if they can avoid it"

tangentially related: love to see yet another "oh hey it turns out politicians CAN just start doing things and ALSO talk very publicly and with conviction about those things they're doing instead of having wait months to even begin a process to start an investigation to look into doing things"

the civil rights movement didn't win by being popular, because it fucking wasn't.

so goes our issues now.

the slogan is not the problem.

whatever avenue you take to try to enforce real, material consequences on cops, is going to have the cops reacting to it exactly how you'd think, no matter how you phrase it. there is no way you can avoid or sneak past this conflict, and an extremely popular slogan won't negate that.

The purpose of "the slogan was stupid" is, and always has been, to deflect the conversation into useless discussion about the slogan rather than solidarity of action towards the cause the slogan is about.

It's some real COINTELPRO shit, so naturally centrists take the bait.

I think that we keep playing parlour games about the etiquette of slogans is because they don’t want to face the horror of the reality that we don’t really have civilian control of police and they are entirely unaccountable to democracy.

but all these thoughts on how important it is to win over voters, to try to pass bills, to go the electoral route...

we keep passing bills to try to hold cops accountable. it's rare, but it happens.

and cops keep blatantly ignoring them.

winning over voters is not the important part.

"defund the police" is where things ended up at, because every police reform victory ended up meaningless because cops could and did ignore them, and that was possible because they could and did threaten local government officials who would have to actually enforce those reforms.

you go "well the point is we ELECT people that are sympathetic to our cause", again, even in the instance where you do elect people who are genuinely sympathetic, being sympathetic to your cause is not nearly as strong as cops being able to go "nice family, shame if anything happened to them."

even assuming you find a slogan that everybody likes, all the voter sympathy in the world smashes like an egg against a steel wall against the fact that the police can, and do, threaten and intimidate your government officials.

"fuck you, make us" >>>>>>> "our new slogan polls at 90 percent"

Why is it my job as a regular person to take “please stop giving money to the armed thugs breaking into people’s homes and murdering moms in mom-vehicles” and feed it to our LITERAL LEADERS like “OH here comes the AEROPLANE open up, nyooomm!”