The Susan Sarandon method of steeling democracy. It worked so well when she declaimed for the exact process of refusing to support Clinton and saying a few years of Trump would push the country to the left.

Lose me on privilege that quits fighting. More vulnerable people than me will suffer.

You need decent slogans: End the Drug War. Police The Police. Demilitarize The Police. End Mass Arrest. Change The Mission.

This is not hard. But yes, if you need your slogans to be hyperbolic and all-encompassing, then enjoy. But don't expect to capture political allies or create change.

Not going to blame the media for pretending that words don't mean what they do. Defund is definitive. Whoever came up with it was a political incompetent.

Plenty of other choices that told the truth in plain words but weren't a raw provocation.

Same horses. Better jockeys. And we are between races right now. This fight has collapsed. The next one will arrive shortly.

Other than that your metaphor kicks ass.

And I do not agree about the losing hand. I think we were defending Americans and it was resonating that the GOP was threat.

Maybe a little little less cyncism about the necessity for good police work and the costs of bad police work and the possibility of changing the mission would do you a world of good.

End the drug war. Stop mass arrest. Police the police.
Target violence. Change the fucking mission.

Evidence okay. Baltimore was locking up 100,000 humans a year, but numbers of those arrested for violence dropped. Worst year in history for murder 2022. Two years ago, new approach. Now looking up maybe a fifth as many -- but twice as many for shootings, guns. Murder rate halved.

Regrettably, there is apparently no law that says federal agents have to identify themselves. It was always simply taken as a premise of competent, ethical law enforcement. Which of course means nothing to anyone doing the work of ICE.

In no way am I suggesting the performance of the FBI, as trained and purposed as they are, is comparable to the thuggery and mission of ICE. I am noting the FBI has itself been complicit in using anonymity to cover its collective ass rather than remain consistently accountable to the public.

i'd even take "look, let's figure out a 100 year plan to get to a star trek future where we don't need prisons". i'm in, good goal, but you gotta at least have a napkin sketch of a plan for making that work

i mean the main problem is they can't tell you what they would do instead of the police in any coherent way, and if pressed they typically reinvent woke lynch mobs as a form of justice.

...bad police and bad police work and policy endure because no coalition can be built for actual reform. Just a bunch a self-purifying sloganeers yelling their favorite rant.

But also, and empirically, those slogans are shit not because they lose the political center required to support real reform, but because they are lies. All cops are not bastards. And police agencies can't be defunded as a whole because better crime response is essential. Meanwhile...

Moronic. Look at what those slogans achieved in actuality in terms of police reform? Look at the extraordinary number of center-left and centrist voters who walked away from those campaigns as fast as their legs could carry them. The messaging was a complete political pratfall. Still is.

The BBC admitted its report was unsupportable and should not have been broadcast

If right wing news doesn’t massively influence public opinion, why do right wing billionaires keep buying loss making media outlets? (I appreciate that this reality might be uncomfortable for many pundits working for those outlets.)

Absolutely. And the BBC claimed that No 10 inserted the 45-minute intel in the dossier knowing it to be untrue – that did not reflect a “wider truth”

All that fawning coverage of RefUK, Farage and Boris Johnson and 31% say biased in favour of the left... unbelievable.

Wow. Even in the deepest, darkest moments any scriptwriter would surely struggle to come up with "the district court's order threatens significant and irreparable harm to the government which outweighs any claimed injury to plaintiffs."

You prefer a fucking purist slogan and warm self-regard than actually winning. If you attempt to physically impede federal agents the result in courts will be military occupation, a greater suspension of civil liberties and more hell for vulnerable cohorts. But hey, you can feel enobled.