Books Abolition. Feminism. Now.

[National Socialist]

These are quotes from Angela Davis book. I read her book Are Prisons Obsolete? and I liked it so I decided to read this. I'll bold what seems most important.

Teen Vogue publishes multiple articles, all identifiable with the tag abolition, on topics ranging from how police do not make us safer to why hate crime laws will not end anti-Asian violence.

As some recognized twenty years ago, abolition is most effectively advanced by naming and elevating an analysis and practice that is collective and feminist.

We mobilize in outrage against the rape of another woman and reject increased policing as the response.

We hold people accountable and believe that people can change.

Sisters Uncut network concretely identifies and demands how budgetary resources can be removed from carceral forms and reinvested in communities, in health care, education, and the arts.

During the period preceding the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, a young Black woman who worked as an emergency medical technician, was executed by police in Louisville, Kentucky, as they entered her residence on a no-knock warrant apparently issued because she was a prior acquaintance of a person sought by the police.

(the collective, CopsAreFlops, has maintained that the South African Police Service purportedly kills three times more people per capita than US police forces),

recognizing that those in Montreal and London are involved in the same conversation as our South African counterparts strengthens our capacity to argue that policing can be driven by structural racism even when the majority of police officers are Black people.

The Women’s House of Detention was also praised for its incorporation of emergent “scientific research,” particularly the practice of carceral isolation as a response to the assumption that one of the “leading causes of crime” was the “ease with which young offenders become influenced by older law-breakers in prison."

Immigrant detention facilities, many of them owned and operated by private prison companies, further consolidated strategies of what is now referred to as “mass incarceration.”

the recognition that race, gender, class, and sexuality were more important determinants of who goes to prison than simply the commission of a crime.

In a December 2020 interview, former president Barack Obama offered a familiar critique: “Snappy slogans” such as “defund the police” are damaging. He stated: “You lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.”

I hate Obama.

in Ava DuVernay’s film 13th, Bryan Stevenson states that there are currently more Black men in prison than there were Black men enslaved in 1850, a point also emphatically made in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

the United States incarcerates more people—both absolutely and per capita—than any other country in the world,

federal legislation like the First Step Act, which opened up potential pathways for releasing a very limited number of people from the federal system—cannot even begin to address the structural character of carceral racism.

Challenging the prevalent assumption that deinstitutionalization of the public asylums helped to drive homelessness and the rise in incarceration, she writes:
deinstitutionalization did not lead to homelessness and increased incarceration. Racism and neoliberalism did, via privatization, budget cuts in all service/welfare sectors, and little to no funding for affordable and accessible housing and social services, while the budgets for corrections, policing, and punishment (of mostly poor people of color) skyrocketed.

In response to mounting pressure from grassroots movements, led and shaped by abolition feminist organizing after Kalief Browder’s death, in 2019 a commission appointed by then mayor Bill de Blasio proposed to close Rikers Island Correctional Facility, the largest jail in the United States, and to open new four jails, one in each borough of the city, with an estimated price tag of almost $11 billion.
...
Many recognized that four new jails would clearly expand, not shrink, the footprint of incarceration in the city of New York.

He's a Democrat.

•We have invested significantly in the criminal legal system, despite knowing that the vast majority of survivors choose not to engage with it and that those who do are often re-traumatized by it.

This is from “The Moment of Truth.”

Many contemporary images associated with #MeToo, Time’s Up, and campus-based Title IX initiatives are still overwhelmingly white, reflecting the institutionalized responses to sexual violence that are aligned with carceral feminism.

This is important because it's criticism of feminism.

Mari Matsuda spoke out immediately after the passage of the 1994 Crime Bill as one of the few public critics of VAWA.

Currently and formerly incarcerated women pointed out that physical and sexual abuse by partners and other individuals did not feel any different from abuse behind walls.

[P]olice are trained to use force rather than to prevent or address root causes of violence, which is perhaps why police officers are more likely to engage in violent behavior with their partners than other groups.

As Leigh Goodmark, a University of Maryland law professor (whose Twitter name as of 2021 is “Recovering Carceral Feminist-Ask Me How!”) and major proponent of decriminalizing gender violence, argues, “Now we know it doesn’t work. We have the data that shows involvement in the criminal legal system does not deter intimate partner violence, does not lower rates of intimate partner violence, and it does not make violence less severe.”

I'll read the source of this in the future.

Survivors of violence would be much more likely to benefit if the over eight billion dollars spent on VAWA between 1995 and 2018 supported free and subsidized services like safe permanent housing, education, accessible health and mental health care, high-quality childcare, and job training and employment placement, in addition to collective and environmental assets such as neighborhood services that promote health and well-being, safe parks, healthy food options, cultural and arts activism, and mutual aid projects.

On November 24, 2015, Chicago was again in the streets over the death of another Black youth, seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald, at the hands of a white police officer. More than a year earlier Laquan McDonald had been shot sixteen times by Jason Van Dyke.
...
McDonald, who was not lunging toward the police but running away.

[A] network of grassroots activists pushed not to prosecute [Jason Van Dyke] but to shrink the footprint of policing.

Local migrant justice organizations, particularly the Immigrant Youth Justice League established in 2009, came together to oppose migrant criminalization and deportation under the Bush and Obama administrations.

Obama was bad

[M]any organizers began to reject the paltry legislative frameworks that rendered most people outside of the limited protection from deportation afforded by the DREAM Act.

Women connected to people confined in the Illinois supermax prison at Tamms successfully agitated to shutter that prison.

This is important because it shows abolition is not unrealistic.

between 1972 and 1991, more than a hundred Black men and at least one woman were subject to torture under Chicago police commander Jon Burge. A report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination detailed:
The torture was intentionally inflicted to extract confessions, and techniques included electrically shocking men’s genitals, ears and lips with cattle prods or an electric shock box, anally raping men with cattle prods, suffocating individuals with plastic bags, mock executions, and beatings with telephone books and rubber hoses.
...
This legislation marked the first time a municipality voted explicitly to provide reparations for cases involving racist police violence.

Love & Protect argues that survivors can only be defended by defunding the police: “Prisons do not support survivors, they punish survivors”

One survivor who was punished and mentioned in this book is Marissa Alexander.

 

[National Socialist]

Multiple campaigns to convict individual police of white supremacist, misogynist, and transphobic “bad acts” have not resulted in contracting the power of policing or rendering it less repressive.

“Kinder, gentler cages” are still prisons, as Critical Resistance co-starter Rose Braz wrote in 2006 in her public response to California’s proposed “gender-responsive prisons,” a plan to build thirty to fifty “mini prisons” in communities across California.

Yet California is considered good because it's blue.

In the fall of 2018, in a courthouse packed with uniformed officers and surrounded by protesters, Van Dyke was convicted on the lesser charge of second-degree murder and received a sentence of eighty-one months.
...
Some Black community leaders were outraged by the leniency of the court when Illinois prisons were overflowing with people serving multiple lifetimes for murder rather than time meted out in months.

For example, Chicago’s annual budget for substance abuse ($2,581,272) amounts to what Chicago spends on half a day of policing.

the majority of calls to police are not about “crime” but about a need for support or services.

The things police do that do not have to do with “crime” could—and should—be done by other bodies: social workers, EMTs, fire fighters, traffic directors, garbage collectors, counselors, neighborhood associations, friends, and so on. That, not so incidentally, is the core of a practical, stepwise process of police abolition:

 

[Sneep]

the United States incarcerates more people—both absolutely and per capita—than any other country in the world,

This isn't even true, not in 2022 and not in 2025. It's been El Salvador for a while now.
El Salvador had about 1,086 per 100,000 people in prison in 2022.
Now it's 1,659 prisoners per 100,000 people.

 

[National Socialist]

This isn't even true, not in 2022 and not in 2025. It's been El Salvador for a while now.
El Salvador had about 1,086 per 100,000 people in prison in 2022.
Now it's 1,659 prisoners per 100,000 people.

El Salvador would otherwise be a good country because it has an abortion ban. What's your opinion on abortion?

 

[National Socialist]

This isn't even true, not in 2022 and not in 2025. It's been El Salvador for a while now.
El Salvador had about 1,086 per 100,000 people in prison in 2022.
Now it's 1,659 prisoners per 100,000 people.

This is a quote from her other book. It still seems to be true, according to a quick glance at Google:

the U.S. population in general is less than five percent of the world’s total, whereas more than twenty percent of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the United States.

 

[geneblackman]

i need to go to jail for bad boy game

 

[Sneep]

El Salvador would otherwise be a good country because it has an abortion ban. What's your opinion on abortion?

I'm against most medical abortions but if it's early in the development before the embryo can feel pain or have a consciousness I'm not against it. Late term abortions are pretty messed up though. Although I think abortions are more permissible to me right now because the world is very messed up, so from a utilitarian/consequentialist perspective, I think we should greatly reduce the human population.

I'd much prefer preventative contraceptives and birth control over any kinds of abortion though.
Apparently 37% of pregnancies in Maryland (my home state) end in abortion. Although, those numbers are from anti-abortion people so idk how accurate it is. Can't imagine 37% more people being here, it's bad enough and has a lot of problems as it is.

 

[National Socialist]

I'm against most medical abortions but if it's early in the development before the embryo can feel pain or have a consciousness I'm not against it. Late term abortions are pretty messed up though. Although I think abortions are more permissible to me right now because the world is very messed up, so from a utilitarian/consequentialist perspective, I think we should greatly reduce the human population.

I'd much prefer preventative contraceptives and birth control over any kinds of abortion though.
Apparently 37% of pregnancies in Maryland (my home state) end in abortion. Although, those numbers are from anti-abortion people so idk how accurate it is. Can't imagine 37% more people being here, it's bad enough and has a lot of problems as it is.

This is disappointing. I was hoping you were fully against abortion. Still, I think you should make a post detailing your opinions on all the top issues.



I actually think late term abortion is better than early abortion because at least the late term aborted person enjoyed more life. More is better. Though I am against all abortion. There are advocates of infanticide like Peter Singer and I don't agree with them.

I don't think contraception is the solution to abortion. I want the birth rate to go up because I want to have at least ten kids. We need to change the culture so that women want this many and even more. While, I haven't read it, there's a book titled One Billion Americans that says growing the US population to one billion would be good. The more people there are, the more society will advance. As Bryan Caplan said, "As the population of the island grows from seven to 7,000 or 7 million, the chance that Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Beethoven, or the Professor resides there sharply improves." Natalism is good because each child born will enjoy his life.

 

[Sneep]

This is disappointing. I was hoping you were fully against abortion. Still, I think you should make a post detailing your opinions on all the top issues.

Which issues in particular? If you make a list I could make a separate post right now detailing some of them.

I actually think late term abortion is better than early abortion because at least the late term aborted person enjoyed more life. More is better. Though I am against all abortion. There are advocates of infanticide like Peter Singer and I don't agree with them.

He only supports killing newborns if they have extreme disabilities where they would suffer immensely, so it's like mercy-killing.
It seems like you're a utilitarian and want to maximize well-being so I'm not sure why you wouldn't agree with his sentiment since by doing that, suffering would be removed.
I find your view to be quite strange though because for me, reducing suffering is more important than maximizing pleasure and happiness.

I don't think contraception is the solution to abortion. I want the birth rate to go up because I want to have at least ten kids. We need to change the culture so that women want this many and even more. While, I haven't read it, there's a book titled One Billion Americans that says growing the US population to one billion would be good. The more people there are, the more society will advance.
As Bryan Caplan said, "As the population of the island grows from seven to 7,000 or 7 million, the chance that Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Beethoven, or the Professor resides there sharply improves."

I don't think we know that to be the case. seeing as that would be contingent upon having a good environment and not just a genetic lottery.
Better to keep the population smaller and have those people highly educated and have a high quality of life than to have a ton of people with a much lower quality of life just in hopes that someone will be born to help those people not have such a bad life. It's paradoxical in that way.

Natalism is good because each child born will enjoy his life.

I think this is a pretty bold assumption to make. I don't know about the empirics exactly but there's a lot of people who wish they were never born and a lot of Americans are on anti-depressants. Like a very large percentage.

 

[National Socialist]

I don't think we know that to be the case. seeing as that would be contingent upon having a good environment and not just a genetic lottery.
Better to keep the population smaller and have those people highly educated and have a high quality of life than to have a ton of people with a much lower quality of life just in hopes that someone will be born to help those people not have such a bad life. It's paradoxical in that way.

I think this is a pretty bold assumption to make. I don't know about the empirics exactly but there's a lot of people who wish they were never born and a lot of Americans are on anti-depressants. Like a very large percentage.

Antinatalism is rare. Most people don't even know what that is. And I'd argue they're unhappy because of their ideology which is based on a lie that life is suffering. Perhaps happiness is a choice.

If we're worried about happiness, we should know there are things that can help - marriage and church attendance are associated with happiness. Perhaps we should be inspired by countries that are happier, such as Saudi Arabia.

The 10 happiest countries in the world (and number three really will surprise you)

Sixty-six thousand people can't be wrong, can they

www.the-independent.com

The bottom line is that the Bible says life is a gift: "What a gift life is to those who stay the course!"

 

[Sneep]

Antinatalism is rare. Most people don't even know what that is.

True, but some people are anti-natalist without even knowing what the term means and some people may be quickly convinced to become anti-natalist if they were given information on the subject.

And I'd argue they're unhappy because of their ideology which is based on a lie that life is suffering. Perhaps happiness is a choice.

To a certain extent, happiness is a choice but at the same time it's still contingent upon other things, if severely messed up things outside of your control keep happening to you, it's going to be a lot harder to be optimistic about life.

If we're worried about happiness, we should know there are things that can help - marriage and church attendance are associated with happiness. Perhaps we should be inspired by countries that are happier, such as Saudi Arabia.

The 10 happiest countries in the world (and number three really will surprise you)

Sixty-six thousand people can't be wrong, can they

www.the-independent.com

I went to the article. The source led me to some Vietnamese scam website. I looked up the survey, the sample size really isn't that large at all, especially based on the number of countries they asked. Only about 60,000 people across 64 countries, that's almost nothing. Plus, I couldn't find the survey done in any reputable journal, it was only posted on a few sketchy looking sites that look like they were created in 2005.
They also mentioned that Iceland made the top 10 list anyways despite their very high divorce rate and they are a very secular country.

The bottom line is that the Bible says life is a gift: "What a gift life is to those who stay the course!"

 

[National Socialist]

True, but some people are anti-natalist without even knowing what the term means and some people may be quickly convinced to become anti-natalist if they were given information on the subject.

To a certain extent, happiness is a choice but at the same time it's still contingent upon other things, if severely messed up things outside of your control keep happening to you, it's going to be a lot harder to be optimistic about life.

I went to the article. The source led me to some Vietnamese scam website. I looked up the survey, the sample size really isn't that large at all, especially based on the number of countries they asked. Only about 60,000 people across 64 countries, that's almost nothing. Plus, I couldn't find the survey done in any reputable journal, it was only posted on a few sketchy looking sites that look like they were created in 2005.

I think the source is on the wayback machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160122105630if_/http://www.wingia.com:80/web/files/richeditor/filemanager/WINGIA_Final_Press_Release_EOY_2015.pdf

The list of happiest countries is in Page 6.

 

[National Socialist]

@Sneep suffering doesn't matter because perhaps God will take it away. "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

A lifetime of suffering is outweighed by an eternity in Heaven.

 

[Sneep]

I think the source is on the wayback machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160122105630if_/http://www.wingia.com:80/web/files/richeditor/filemanager/WINGIA_Final_Press_Release_EOY_2015.pdf

The list of happiest countries is in Page 6.

I see. Seems legit however, the sample size is still quite small and that was nearly a decade ago now.

@Sneep suffering doesn't matter because perhaps God will take it away. "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

A lifetime of suffering is outweighed by an eternity in Heaven.

I used to believe this as well, then I came to the realization that religion is basically a cope for most people. I believe in materialism now.
It was a difficult pill for me to swallow initially but I think my life is better off for it. That's why I prioritize this life first and foremost, because there is no guarantee that we will see an afterlife.
From everything we can observe, consciousness arises out of our brain, a physical organ. Once the brain goes out, our life goes with it, never to return.

I'm not trying to pass any judgements off about you, but In my case, I think religion was a cope from the more brutal realities of this world.