"Defund the police". No no, we don't actually mean defund the police...
"Anti work". No no, we don't actually mean we're anti work...
"True, the subreddit is called /r/antiwork. And yes, their motto (right at the top of their page) is "Antiwork: Unemployment for all, not just the rich!". But is it fair to call them "Anti-work"? Have you considered their moderate membership?"
"defund" is the progressive recuperation of abolition, and "nobody actually means defund" is the liberal recuperation of that.
the process is playing out again with anti-work.
it's hard for the radical origins to refuse the attention and alliance, even if it undercuts and defuses them in the end. at least the overton window moves a bit.
I suppose you identified the potential problem here: people inferring that “defund the police” doesn’t actually mean “defund the police” and ascribing softer, feel-good intentions which aren’t there.
I was thinking more of a case like this: If someone is already outraged about police brutality and they see that a "defund the police" rally is happening, there's a greater chance they'll go as it offers them an opportunity to express their general dissatisfaction with the police regardless of whether they agree 100% with the specific ideology of the organizer. When the headline the next day reads "10000 Attend Defund the Police Rally", this leads to the perception that 10000 people believe in defunding the police when the actual number is much smaller
But it’s a bit long.
But that’s a story as common as blue skies and chirping birds: once your favorite sub-Reddit gets big enough…it starts to stink.
- An alien invasion movie
Not gonna say I subscribe in text, but in merit...I mean...
To some extent I also believe it's natural to try to elicit an emotional response from the other "side," because then you can focus on attacking their words, tone, character, etc instead of engaging in reasoned discourse and debate. You get a bit of an automatic advantage if your opponent is already in an emotionally charged state. From what I've seen, the phrases you mention are pretty good at that too.
All of this ends up doing more harm than good most, if not all, of the time.
It's unfortunate that people are trying to turn such things into political statements.
I think it can be claimed that it limits the rate of spread, not total spread/infections.
Limiting rate of spread is the same thing as reducing how many infections there are at any given time. Or, the total over a bounded time frame. I don't think "well there will still be about the same total number of infections by 2025 with or without masking" is a useful observation.
Sure. We're probably all getting this thing at some point. But, that's why I said "until all ages are able to be vaccinated."
I really wish the US and other countries would take the Singapore route and require the unvaccinated assholes clogging up our medical system (and exhausting our highly trained/educated/caring physicians and nurses) to pay their own healthcare costs incurred due to COVID.
Having the unvaccinated directly realize some cost for their own ignorance seems highly appropriate here. Although I suppose at least some of them are paying the ultimate price with their life, which is also very unfortunate.
The former just seem like good politics: "states' rights" allowed slave owners to court people who were worried about "big government" while conveniently ignoring the grave injustice that's actually occurring. The latter seems like good twitter politics; it'll get good engagement for being so inflammatory, but at the end of the day, most people don't actually agree.
It's one thing to say "defund the police", and it's another to say "penalize police brutality, take police funds and use them to fund social workers trained to disarm situations without using violence, etc."
I don't know about that. More like it muddies the waters and leads to miscommunication and polarization
It’s not hard to come up with a catchy tagline that doesn’t completely misrepresent the movement. Thing is, the movement is about defunding police. They’re not shy about that: https://defundthepolice.org/
They never do anything about property crime, even for middle class white people out in middle class 'burbs.
The one time we had a shooting anywhere nearby it was really weird and looked a whole lot like a (small-time—the dude was clearly not a seasoned pro, as he wandered into the wrong house first, telling the occupants they weren't who he was after before leaving) organized crime hit, and AFAIK they never solved it even with several witnesses, it happening in broad daylight, and both victims surviving, plus the guy apparently traveling a good long way on foot to and from the scene, and that was years ago, so they're 0/1 on scary violent crime in my area. I can't imagine they'd do better in a more typical case, unless it's one of those incredibly obvious "the boyfriend did it" situations that any idiot could solve in two minute flat. Traffic enforcement should probably be someone else's job anyway, not the police. Imagine how many fewer police officers we could have if they didn't spend 75% of their time sitting on the side of the road with a radar gun, and how much cheaper people who only did that would be—I think we only maintain the status quo because police benefit from fines & seizures, so they don't want to lose that, and as an excuse to fish for other (mostly victimless) crimes or "crimes" (like having too much money in the passenger seat).
I don't really care one way or the other, but if folks in less-nice parts of town want to try getting rid of them, seems OK to me. If it goes very wrong, I expect they'll get experience practically all the downside, so if they think it's a good idea, cool, let's try it. They're mostly dead weight from my perspective anyway—I don't get why actually defunding them, at least to try it out and see what happens, is such a big deal. They're incredibly ineffective and unhelpful, at best. Starting from scratch and seeing what we actually need to pay for doesn't seem like a crazy idea.
"cultural appropriation" - no no, we mean cultural appropriation but from minorities (it's amusing that the popular definitions you see of cultural appropriation have cultural appropriation in it).
"white fragility" - no no, we don't mean white people are fragile but that some are uncomfortable talking about race issues
If you have to explain what your shitty buzzword means every time, then it's not designed to convey your bait-and-switch definition.
Anyway, "Anti work" may as well be parsed as "Anti The-Kind-Of-Bullshit-Work-We've-Been-Doing". A totally reasonable interpretation.
A single voice may have freedom of speech, but the accepted narrative is controlled and much louder.
The crowd around here, of course, always constantly jumps on this as if it is all one big inconsistent argument from a specific group. Selectively forgetting in these moments what the internet is like in general. It's funny, just look at the peer replies here, people are so excited to point out the patent inconsistency, the naive radicals who don't know what they want; obviously because people who would even have something close to those thoughts must be confused and irrational.
To some degree it's click bait, and people getting used to it.
Like "anti work" being the click bait version of "anti how work is currently handled".
We have a general social understanding of the word "defund" that also encapsulates "moving money/responsibilities from one department to another one." So it feels a little bit like a double standard to in this case assume that it necessarily means complete abolition.
But I think thesuitonym is still right to point out that this is inconsistent with how these words are regularly used in other contexts. There are people directly under their post arguing that no, defund literally means removing all money, the dictionary says so -- and that's just a really silly argument if we look at how the word is used most commonly in politics.
When people across multiple political parties are arguing about defunding everything from schools, to the IRS, to NASA, to the military, to the Post Office, it's just not honest for people to argue that in this specific case we should should look at the first result in Webster and ignore everything else.
The movement was never ONLY Black Lives Matter, or Cops Lives Don't Matter, or any of the other ways various opponents have decided to interpret the name to justify ignoring the societal criticisms of the protests.
Truth is, words are tough, and the more complex and nuanced a topic gets to be, the more a pity simple phrase or title become impossible to be accurate. Additionally, being provocative has its uses, especially in the early awareness stages of a movement.
Anti means you are against something, so the natural reading is that you don't want that thing (work) to be a thing anymore, not the more convoluted meaning you say is 'exactly that' even though nobody unfamiliar can possibly guess at it from just the word anti.
"Defund the police" meaning "zero funds for the police" or "no police exist". "Anti-work" meaning "against all work" or "work" meaning "general expenditure of productive effort" or something.
You can look a little bit more into any slogan or label and see more of what it entails. Hell, some people might want to abolish police entirely or have everyone laze around in utopian bliss while not starving. Feel free to disagree with the former and see if the latter have any plan to not starve or if it's nonsense. I've generally taken each to mean "we should allocate public security and safety money differently" and "our current construct of the job as the sole driver of societal worth is bad".
So "default" to something more reasoned and nuanced and see if they are absolutist rather than the reverse. Pithy and descriptive tend to not go hand in hand so this applies often.
Why would anyone "assume nuance" from explicit language? There's no ambiguity about what it says at face value.
Even proponents can't keep it straight in this case. An above user suggests it means "People should not have to work to live. ", whereas the anti-work sub's faq describes its mission as being "against work under Capitalism". To the extent that one labors under Socialism, they labor to live, if History is any indication. Notwithstanding, "living" can practically mean more than just subsistence since, obviously, no one supporting anti-work is starving. They're thinking about comfort and quality of life, not merely survival, and this is deliberately conflated. They can all quit their jobs and survive. Moreover, basic income, once it is implemented, would allow citizens to be consumers and purchase more comforts without working even in a Liberal democratic Capitalist society - that isn't contingent on Socialism at all.
If your buzzword means whatever it is you want it to mean, and others persistently don't interpret it the same way, then it's a failure. It only succeeds at increasing friction.
: to withdraw funding from
And yes, if I decide to withdraw all of my checking account from an ATM, I get... all of it.
"Withdraw" doesn't imply partial things. What you choose to withdraw, you withdraw.
To put it another way, if the intention was to create a succinct label that gave people a generally accurate impression before they heard the details, it was a complete failure.
Conservatives in particular love it because if they want to misrepresent it as something radical and alarming, they just have to repeat the same name that its proponents use. (Not that that is necessarily going to work for them -- I think it comes off as a bit too obvious and lazy, especially since proponents have stuck with the label and coalesced support around it.)
I don't necessarily think it's a bad name, because it has attracted a lot of attention, and the idea has gained momentum, but it's just too obvious to deny that "defund the police" was designed to be misunderstood. For good tactical reasons, maybe, but obviously intended to mislead.
Sorry but this has to be the dumbest most elitist sheltered things I've heard.
You ARE free to do what you want. What you are not free to do is demand that others support you in this endeavor.
Is your idea that policeman, firefighters, emt, doctors, teachers, farmers and the the plethora of other jobs necessary to sustain modern life should work while you are allowed go off and spend your day in hot yoga classes while they support you????
If I didn't have to work to live, I could pursue that dream.
The solution to your problem is not force a certain section of the population to work and give their salary to you so you get to "pursue your dream". Why do you get to do what you want while others are forced to keep your power on and your sewer system working daily?
Decisions have consequences, if you want something then you will need to sacrifice in certain areas.
As you can see they've already started flagging me for just mentioning the facts of what they're doing. I'm sure one of them will come along with some -ist inflammatory remark soon.
> A subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
The Socialist argument is that profit motives are fundamentally exploitative of workers, and that ownership over the means of production should be in the hands of people who work there. The reason why capitalism is bad is because it enables a privileged few to not work, by making other people do their jobs for them. This is why most Socialist law considers "social parasitism" to be a crime: work is a virtue.
The Anarchist argument is that work itself is the exploitation and that we should strive to reduce it wherever possible. The reason why capitalism[0] is bad is because it creates bullshit jobs that don't need to exist, not just that the workers aren't getting paid enough to do those bullshit jobs.
A good way to remember this is that Socialists gave us labor unions, while Anarchists gave us the 9-to-5 work day.
What seems to have happened is that /r/antiwork started off as strictly left-libertarian, and then gradually expanded to the sort of vague Internet Leftist consensus that we see today. This is a particular brand of left-populism that likes to use the word "socialism" a lot, despite promoting policies more akin to social democrats. There's an annoying quirk of populism (either side) in which they get drunk off justice porn and extremism and don't actually form a coherent political platform. It's one thing to say "I hate capitalism", and another thing to actually propose a workable reform or replacement. Reddit is particularly bad at this as the karma system encourages "content consumption" - i.e. the production of low-effort memes because that's what people upvote immediately. In a way, gaming Reddit itself is it's own bullshit job.
[0] I should point out that Anarchists do not restrict their criticism to merely capitalism but all forms of coercive power, up to and including Socialism as I have defined it here, as well as the Communism that the Soviet Union implemented. "Work is a virtue" is something shared across capitalism and Socialism alike.
Thankfully that TRO was dissolved, but nonetheless.
Obviously there's a market for that sort of thing, so I guess that says something. I just wouldn't use people's fantasies to deduce something about their actual behavior - I think almost everyone at one point fantasizes about not needing their job.
Like most of Reddit, the style and rhetorical flourishes are over the top. But the substance being posted does not seem to match what a surface analysis would imply.
Its not popular on HN but most of the libertarian tenants that belay picking yourself up by your bootstraps are not applicable to a supermajority of labor. There is no change of attitude within the framing of the economic system as it exists that individual actors take on a collective scale to suddenly stop being exploited systemically.
...so continue working aka the exact opposite of what anti-work seems to imply. Gotcha.
Another term got co-opted for political purposes, wonderful. Nonsense that once again originates in the US, which will inevitably land on our shores in no time.
Some of the people in /r/antiwork see these shortages as artificial or caused by a society that funnels labor toward profit instead of toward need, but to your other point, there are a lot of people on that reddit who are incredibly naive or just have a chip on their shoulder.
from a objective POV many but not all are mostly artificial, but not because of someone planing it or anything like that, but because of emergent behavior of our economical system and the complexity of supply chains.
Sadly all of this is very hard to change.
Especially with our world currently heading into a not so grate direction in nearly every sector and most countries...
Then over the last year it has turned into a wall of (mostly fake) "my boss is bad" stories.
edit: There are many smaller communities on reddit that do have mature conversation and content, they're just vastly outnumbered by the edgy teen clickbait content we see on the front page.
You should tell this to them. I've spent a lot of time in the sub (left recently though) and many of the people there seem to think we have the technology and means for a fully automated economy and are simply choosing not to switch over.
They truly believe if we had some form of pseudo-anarchist revolution, they would never have to spend another day doing anything but fun, rewarding activities.
The subreddit is mostly about people languishing the fact they cannot escape this cycle and day dreaming about how to get out, or sharing horrible work experiences with others for sympathy.
I don't think this is the point of "anti work". The point is (to me) that people should be treated equitably at work and that work shouldn't be the center of our lives