PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]
Anarchist, autistic, engineer, and Certified Professional Life-Regretter. If you got a brick of text, don’t be alarmed; that’s normal.
- 0 Posts
- 105 Comments
I think you made some really good points about how, in some circumstances, abolishing local police is possible if people can be convinced to do it. This is something I genuinely overlooked that I need to think more about.
This is still not a trivial ask in many communities because the police will try to protect their existence. For example, if people tried to vote the NYPD out of existence, the NYPD has huge resources compared to the community they oppress to produce and broadcast propaganda. In comparison, some small-town police department might not have access to drastically more money than everyone else, at least not enough to flood the airwaves. Additionally, the Free State Project is absolutely tiny. It is something that the capitalists can afford to lose control over. But I think you made some good points and provided a good example.
However, even the Free State Project is under the jurisdiction of at least the FBI and the state police of the state in which they leave, even if they are difficult to call. And lots of places are in border control’s jurisdiction (like a lot a lot, because it’s the borders + the coastline + 100 miles inward!). So these police are going to be much more difficult to abolish by vote, practically impossible.
I’m happy to show you evidence and reasons, and sources. Are you open to that?
Always!
You keep lecturing me at quite a lot of length
Sorry about that, both the lecturing and “at length”.
You can also, if you think an anarchist community would make it work better, just make it happen and make your community, just like the libertarians did.
Yeah that works for very small scale rural communities, but what about the cities and suburbs where the majority of the population is? Those areas are more locked down.
Part 2
It was just “research” from your “comrades,” which makes it sound like only comrades can come up with truth, and anyone else needs to learn from them before “spouting off.” You literally said at one point “don’t use your judgement.”
I want to expand a bit on the “don’t use your judgement” point. A better way to say that would have been: “defer your judgement to that of the victim.” Choosing to defer your judgement to someone else is still a judgement call. And in the case where you are the victim, this collapses into making the judgement call for yourself.
And the reason I said that is because if the victim does not want the cops involved, then the cops should not get involved, period. I don’t see this as controversial, even if the cops weren’t the baddies. But since they are, bringing them in where they’re not welcome is a recipe for violence and further arrests.
I will admit that I typically give my comrades’ views the most weight, but I absolutely do listen to non-anarchists. Actually, that’s one of the reasons I have a SDF account: because almost no one is defederated from us, and we don’t block anyone (I think), so at least as far as Lemmy is concerned, I get stuff from lemmy.world and other non-anarchist instances and people on Lemmy. And for my news digest, I actually just compare several mainstream and independent media sources and try to “estimate” the story from the “corrupted signal” I get from taking all those sources.
I think you are mischaracterizing how insular the anarchist movement actually is.
The cops in most cities are organized by the city council and the mayor. “Capitalism” has nothing to do with it, except indirectly, because it takes money and connections to get on city council.
The phrase “except indirectly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here! Capitalism has an absolutely enormous but indirect effect on local politics. You can buy a politician’s loyalty for shockingly little, so little that even local businesses can do it for local politicians.
There are a lot of places where people through the exercise of their democracy, reduced the funding for the police, instituted other programs like social workers going to some calls, got the police force out of doing traffic enforcement, basically, doing reforms.
And where have those reforms gotten us? Every single time the reformers say they’re going to do some reform, then it gets watered down, and eventually the cops somehow get extra money, extra training, and nothing changes. Supplementary to the discussion above, this is why we need to abolish the police.
If the whole city council tried to disband the police completely, and just have an anarchist city, they would probably lose their election because the people of the city wouldn’t like that idea.
I don’t agree with you here. I think that, if we actually disbanded the police, people would be happier. Also, I’m not interested in winning elections. I’m interested in bringing power to the people.
But there is not some other entity that’s coming from outside and “enforcing” the police on the people of the city. It’s just the city government, which is our system, is changeable by a majority of the people every few years, if enough people can get on board for it.
It is absolutely not our system. In my case, the municipal government is the local branch of the state government, which is itself subordinate to the federal government. And at all levels, the people with the money are the ones that pull the strings. If push comes to shove and it’s the will of the people vs the will of the higher levels of government, the will of the government usually wins, and the will of the most powerful local capitalist will win every time (because states amplify the political power of those who are wealthy enough to prop them up).
It’s not like some Amazon warehouse where the “owners” run the city and make there be police, and there’s nothing the people in the city can do about it.
I would argue that this basically is the reality of the situation, and that the voting is just to make the smallest of changes. (“If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal.” I would like to offer a corollary: if a possibility is so impactful that it would actually disrupt the capitalist order, it will never be put up for a vote, because the government gets to decide what gets voted on, and the politicians are indirectly controlled by the capitalists.) Like with police interrogations, voting is not an equal interaction between the government and its subjects. The government has all the power, and that power is controlled by the capitalist class.
No offense, but I think you might misunderstand some core principles of contemporary anarchist philosophy, like how capitalism and politics are intertwined, and that might be why you’re not getting a warm reception amongst anarchists. I definitely recommend you check out Section D.2 of the Anarchist FAQ, and skim the rest of Section D. (Yes there’s a holy-shitload of reading for anarchists 😆. I can probably find you a YouTube or audiobook version if you’re not in the mood to do all that reading.)
Tl;Dr please read the PDF I linked. It will explain how interrogations work a lot better than I am capable of. And it won’t yell at you.
Part 1
I read your initial paragraph and didn’t see anything even remotely resembling “this is why” or where logically your argument came from.
To be honest, I thought we were on the same page about the cops being baddies, but on different pages about what to do about it, especially since you said you were looking to post in an anarchist community.
you have to realize that you wrote me an initial message with “All cops are bastards, always, everywhere, forever, no exceptions” “a worthless piece of shit.” “No they aren’t” “No you fucking don’t” “it’s terrible advice” and so on.
Yes, there was lots of swearing. That does not diminish my point. In fact, it enhances it, because it increases the chance of it being understood by the widest possible audience, and it underscores the importance of the message. It also forces the reader to practice confronting their beliefs, which in the real world are going to resemble my first post more than a perfectly typed theoretical tome.
I.e., just because someone is yelling at me doesn’t mean that what they’re saying is wrong. And this is something that really takes practice, to learn to listen even when someone is being up in your face, because I might just be “that wrong” or even stepping on someone’s toes in a way I don’t understand. For this reason, I really appreciate contemporary anarchist essays for being upfront and confrontational.
Let’s take these one at a time.
All cops are bastards, always, everywhere, forever, no exceptions
If you want, replace “bastards” with “baddies” and this is exactly what I want to communicate.
Why are cops ever the baddies? Because
- They enforce the will of the capitalist class. More plainly: they work for the rich; your interests come last. In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the cops do not have to “protect and serve.” Even if they are taken at their word, even the pretext of law enforcement, namely to enforce the law as it is written, gives away the game: they enforce the law as it is written without regard for the ethics or effects of those laws.
- The few times that ordinary people do benefit from police interactions, these are not part of the function of the system. For example, sometimes cops will “not see something” if they’re trying to be nice. For example, if a homeless person is living under the overpass, an individual police officer might decide to leave the homeless person alone instead of giving them a ticket for loitering. Now in my view, this is, morally, the absolute bare minimum. But from the perspective of the police department, this is a (small) dereliction of duty, because the homeless person can be found to be breaking the law, yet the officer refused to enforce the law.
- The proof is in my personal experience, the experiences of everyone I’ve ever known, the people to whom I have listened to (comrades or otherwise!), my experience following the news daily (usually NOT from anarchist or even anarchist-sympathetic sources!), all the statistics about police I have ever seen, all the true crime slop I’ve watched, hell even C.O.P.S. made the cops look bad to me, and all the books and articles I have ever read on the topic. And look at what the cops openly and proudly focus on: harassing the homeless, prosecuting drug addicts, harassing sex workers, deporting migrants, silencing protests. And that’s just what they’ll brag about.
Why are the cops everywhere baddies? Because they are baddies in every country, because all states exist to prop up the interests of the locally powerful people, and the police serve the interests of their local state. This is, in my view, a fundamental pillar of contemporary anarchist thought, and I can refer you to literature for a better justification if needed.
Why are cops always baddies? Because being a police officer is defined by membership in a police department, because the powers and protections police officers get are at least mostly effective as long as the officer is in good standing with a police department, including when off-duty.
Why are cops forever baddies? Because:
- At some point, they did not exist. But if they never existed and someone created them right this very second, I would still be able to argue based on the cops’ own stated purpose that they are the baddies.
- When they were created, they were branched out from slave-catching patrols. Slave- catching is evil because it violates the principle of autonomy, which is again a pillar of anarchist philosophy. So they started off evil.
- As modern policing grew into what it is today, the blatant disregard for autonomy has not really improved, as evidenced by the existence of prisons, jails, and police killings. So in the recent past and present, police have been evil. This is supplementary to the discussion above.
- If we keep doing policing like we do now, then it would still be an evil institution. But if we changed it, then the change would really have to be so drastic that it would simply be something else entirely, because the police are such a fractally evil organization.
Why are there no exceptions? Because cops are a subset of the set of baddies, and this is because, as discussed above, cops are evil because their function is evil. So the only way for a cop to stop being evil on account of being a cop is to stop being a cop. And when individual police officers do something good, they do it in spite of being a cop, often in flagrant dereliction of their duty to uphold the law as it is written.
“a worthless piece of shit.”
I very carefully worded that to make it clear that I am calling the police worthless pieces of shit.
Which I am. And they are. They’re actually a lot worse than shit, because shit can be useful as fertilizer. The police, on the other hand, keep our species from reaching its full potential.
“No they aren’t”
Yes, that’s one of the points I want to make. That was in response to “(The police are) there to solve real problems.” My issue really was with the word solve. In case it was unclear: yes, the problems are real, and i do not mean to trivialize them. Furthermore, their pretext for being there will likely be to solve the problem. But they are not there to solve the problem. Solving the problem is a pretext for reestablishing control of the situation in a way that is palatable to their paymasters. In rare cases, for example stopping serial killers (which, from watching hundreds of true crime documentaries, which are notoriously pro-police: they are terrible at doing!), these interests line up with the interests of the people, but considering how many people have their lives ruined or ended by police for property crimes, crimes of poverty, drug crimes, antisocial crimes (i.e. pissing in the street), it is clear to me that this is the exception rather than the norm. That’s what I desperately need to communicate.
“No you fucking don’t”
This was in response to the bit about talking with the police. In the guide I linked, there is a huge section about how the police ask you all sorts of innocent, easy questions to butter you up for hard ones. You really should not talk to the police almost ever. Talking to the police is not a equal exchange. The cops have all the power, and they will use whatever psychological and physical means that they can to fill up their case files.
Saying “no you fucking don’t” was crucial to demonstrate how seriously dangerous a choice that is to make. If I had said “no you don’t”, that would have betrayed how important this point is.
“it’s terrible advice”
Again, that’s the point I wanted to make. I’m not saying that to be mean, I’m saying that because I think it needs to be said. If you told me “you should plug your fork into the outlet” with complete sincerity, I would tell you “that’s a terrible idea, don’t do that” because following that advice could be fatal. I would rather see you alive and upset at me than dead by listening to terrible advice. And then once the fork is down, I will gladly infodump about why it is a terrible idea to fuck with electricity. But in that moment, I need you to put the fork down. Similarly, I need you to not collaborate with the cops in the future. Lives are at stake. At least after whatever incident you’re going through in the present moment since I acknowledge it might be too difficult to reverse course.
No, you would have loved to give me “the answer,” using the model that everything I think is stupid and everything you think is right and can’t be questioned. I’ll pass.
*sigh* No I wouldn’t have, no I don’t think that everything you think is stupid, and I most certainly do not think that everything I think is right and can’t be questioned. In fact, I rewrote my reply several times because I wanted to critique my own beliefs before I posted it. And I indicated in my reply that I desperately want my response to be torn apart to improve my understanding of the world. The guide I posted is not the answer, but I do believe it is a good one.
And I’m sorry if anarchists have treated you like that. I desperately want you to contribute to the discussion, because you probably have some experience to offer that can add some subtlety to the discussion. But a discussion goes both ways. Even on Lemmy.world, there are about a dozen people telling you that their experience contradicts your advice. It at least calls for some thought.
You are mistaking your ideology for reality. You don’t need to learn anything, or test any assumptions, because your ideology already gave you the answer and your emotional conviction lets you know that it’s right. That’s a dangerous mistake.
Isn’t this the exact kind of thing you just accused anarchists of doing to you? You’re dismissing my experience, and frankly the experience of almost every single other commenter here, as mere “ideology”. This so-called anti-police “ideology” (really “sentiment”) is the distilled experience of thousands of anarchists and millions of working people of all stripes. Please at least listen to it. I can’t and don’t want to force you to internalize it, but please at least listen. Listening is what separates a shitty anarchist from a good one.
I had an interaction with the cops this week. They solved our problem when someone else had completely failed, even though it was that other person’s job. I’m actually just about to call the precinct and talk to them again about it, because we still have some questions.
That genuinely sucks, and I hope it works out for you. The point I’m trying to make is that, as far as the function of the police are concerned, your positive experience is an accident. It is not designed to help you.
Terrible advice. Please, check this guide from Projet Évasions (PDF warning) instead.
Cops are not always the enemy or the maniacal whole-job-is-making-evil thugs that Lemmy sometimes makes them out to be.
Yes, they literally are. All cops are bastards, always, everywhere, forever, no exceptions, no matter what they are currently doing or have done prior, and capitalism is always evil, so their whole job is in fact making evil, and anytime they do something beneficial is an accident. If a person puts on that uniform, they’re a worthless piece of shit. End of story. Individual cops can stop being pieces of shit by burning the uniform and trying to fix the lives they have broken.
It really is bad for people to get mugged or their cars broken into, and they’re the solution our society has come up with to minimize the amount of it that happens. It’s not always a bad thing.
Emphases mine. I’ll take them one by one:
- Cops were and are imposed on us by the capitalist class. Any consent ever expressed for these monsters has been beaten into us by generations of police violence and then solidified by propaganda.
- That is not their purpose. Their purpose is to maintain order for capitalism. Historically, modern police forces descended from slave-catching patrols. In interrogations specifically, their purpose is to gather information to build up a case file. The presence of police does not deter crime, and the deterrence of crime is only a pretext for the police to do what they’re actually paid to do.
- Interacting with cops is always an immediate personal danger, especially after you have been hurt or are vulnerable, because they are unhinged monsters who will send you to the morgue if you make them too uncomfortable. You might decide to make that choice to interact with them to prevent some greater evil, for example being courteous during a traffic stop to prevent the cops from detaining you for being suspicious. But at the end of the day, we must recognize that any interaction with the cops is always treacherous.
If you find yourself talking to the cops, there are more or less three ways:
They’re there to solve a real problem.
No they aren’t, they’re there to enforce the will of the capitalist class. Practically , they’re there because they either think they witnessed a violation of the law, or because someone called them. Rarely do they even attempt to solve problem, and in the rarer circumstance that individual cops do solve a problem, it is because they betrayed their actual function as cops.
Someone’s car got broken into, someone got beat up. Just talk with them. Tell them what you know, help them figure out the situation.
No you fucking don’t, because that cop will likely use your evidence to go after someone who didn’t do it. They don’t stop crime, they don’t solve crimes, they only provide information to the judges and terrorize the streets while doing it. Don’t help the cops with property crimes.
In almost all of the US, their effect on the problem will be positive
Use your judgement as to whether that’s warranted of course, and your impression of the justice level in your local area, since it varies quite a lot in the US.
Don’t use your judgement, use the judgement of the victims! If they don’t want the cops involved, then they don’t get involved and that should be the end of the discussion.
The same applies with any type of federal law enforcement, I suspect, for the next few years.
It has applied for the entire existence of the modern police, and it will continue to apply as long as police exist. The guide I linked was written in 2022. Yes, we need to hammer this point over and over and over until people understand that no administration, even the so-called lesser-evil party, will ever be on their side except perhaps by accident.
I was going to post this as a comment, but it was in an anarchism community, and I figured some sections of it might be unacceptable there.
Rightly so, because it’s terrible advice and it’s clear to me that you haven’t sought out any wisdom from the community. What you should have done was asked for critique. We would have loved to talk about this in more detail on any anarchist forum.
In my view, it is so much more important to listen to people as an anarchist (or any kind of revolutionary) than it is to spout off my views, hence why I don’t really post that often. Even this comment I expect and hope to get torn to shreds in the hope of improving the quality of my understanding of the world. So next time, please actually solicit the advice of your comrades before making statements, and in general do some research before making posts like these. Hence why I have started this comment with a link to a guide solicited from a group of anarchists.
If AI spits out stuff it’s been trained on
For Stable Diffusion, it really doesn’t just spit out what it’s trained on. Very loosely, it starts with white noise, then adds noise and denoises the result based on your prompt, and it keeps doing this until it converges to a representation of your prompt.
IMO your premise is closer to true in practice, but still not strictly true, about large language models.
I didn’t ask for your answer, I asked for your opinion. I already knew that you didn’t have the answer. Nether do I.
Amen.
I do, however, have a great love for game theory, and game theory tells me that there’s only one correct decision to make where voting in the USA in 2024 is concerned.
Any recommendations for game theory resources? I’ve been putting it off for a while.
I hope this doesn’t come across as condescending. I don’t mean it that way but people often tell me I’m being condescending.
Don’t you just hate it when that happens? I’ve been there so many times. I feel you.
I wish you all the best in life. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you in any way, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you want a conversational partner or a sympathetic ear. I’m always open to discussing the world with intelligent people.
Will do. This honestly means the world because I don’t have a lot of players in my court.
If you’re interested in communal living or alternative lifestyles (at it pertains to anarchist communities), I’m happy to help there, as well. I think I still have some friends that know folx at Emma Goldman Finishing School in Seattle. Admittedly, I don’t know if they’re looking for any new members right now, but I’d be happy to put a word in for you.
Unfortunately, I’m kinda stuck on the “poor grad student” path. Got oodles of loans to pay off, but I also got tons of new tools and solutions to technical problems
that I’ll likely never be allowed to work on. IMO I’d be more useful paying their bail funds as a successful engineer than living there and being a nuisance…because I am a nuisance to live with lol. I dormed for a few semesters and I can count on two hands the number of times I ever talked to my suitemates or neighbors, and one of them was a really nice dude.
From the song’s lyrics:
I don’t believe you have the answer
I’ve got ideas too
but if you’ve got enough naivete
and you’ve got conviction
then the answer is perfect for you
That’s kind of an obnoxious response when you yourself said:
I fear that you’re mistaking your own pessimism for absolute truth, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.
(emphasis mine) followed by:
What, in your view, needs to be done?
Like you basically asked for my answer after saying you’d be willing to be convinced. You asked “what needs to be done?”, and I replied with things that I think need to be done. If you didn’t ask, I would have kept my mouth shut because frankly I’m pathologically disinterested in telling people what to do, probably to a fault. If you weren’t convinced then that’s fine, but it’s just kind of obnoxious to ask for an answer and then chide me for giving you my answer.
When fascists take power it’s not unheard of for them to line up commies and anarchists against a wall and shoot them.
Yes, and that’s why we need to prepare ourselves for when they do, which they WILL do regardless of who gets elected as the figurehead.
I’m all for ideological utopianism
I’m not [2]! I have explained over and over again all throughout my responses in this post’s comment section that I have very practical motivations for why voting is a waste of time. I encourage you to go through my comment history and see what I have said to others in this thread.
but preserving your moral superiority…
Yo literally the first thing I posted in this comment section was a meme dunking on the delegates and their misery, which is bar none the most engagement I have received on any comment and almost all of it negative. No one here thinks I’m morally superior. And in case you were wondering, I don’t like me either.
So let’s explicitly do away with the moral superiority pretense [1].
… is little comfort when you and your family are staring down the barrel of a fascist’s gun.
Yes, exactly, that’s why we need to build our community defenses against these fascist pricks before they kill us, keeping in mind that we’re in a liberal dominated community on a “civility-at-all-costs” instance where we’re not allowed to talk seriously about revolution!
But as I have said to other users, particularly the comment you initially replied to:
I got no beef with people voting for Democrats in the general election, even though I disagree with their choice, because it doesn’t affect the outcome of anything. My beef is with these delegates, these people in a position of influence and power.
So go vote Democrat if that makes you feel safe, I’m not going to bring it up again because it doesn’t matter, but I’m not gonna pretend that it’s helpful.
But also keep in mind that these are the assholes who platformed a cop over a Palestinian in the middle of their genocide…
Again, I invite you to reread what I’ve commented to you so far, and to go through my comment history and see what I’ve said to others.
[1] Really, my position is, boiled down, that supposedly “practical” solutions that violate common morality (for example, letting people die to save money in *insert industry here*) are not really practical at all. This inextricably couples practicality to morality.
Frankly, as a human actor who fails to always act practically, I acknowledge that for similar reasons, sometimes I also fail to act morally, i.e. in laughing at the pain of other humans because they happen to collude with an evil institution. Hence why I reject the idea that I am morally superior, and that I have asserted as such anywhere in this comment section.
And in the sense that the means should reflect the ends, I admit that I haven’t lived up to my own ideals, out of anger and irritation at the constant stream of bullshit being foisted on me and everyone I know by these very Democrat ghouls.
But I don’t believe that I need to be a perfect moral actor to speak out about Palestine and the fascists at the DNC!
[2] For similar reasons as those in [1], ideology should be coupled to practicality, which itself should be coupled to morality. Hence why I’m not interested in anarchism as a utopian ideology where anything is prescribed, but as a practical solution for humanity to overcome capitalism.
Unpaywalled link: https://archive.ph/JeMpG
By Betteridge’s law, the answer is no.
On a serious note, to the people who own these kinds of websites: find a more ethical way to make your money or go the fuck out of business.
I fear that you’re mistaking your own pessimism for absolute truth, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.
Indigenous Action did a great write-up on this topic. Although to be completely honest, the point of this thread was really to condemn the DNC delegates specifically. Actually, I brought up voting at all in this thread in response to the suggestion that I am:
Willing to let lgbt, people of color, students, poor people and the working class be oppressed and possibly murdered.
As a poor grad student, and sibling to two lovely LGBT POC for whom I would literally kill to protect, this is a particularly offensive implication (from a different user!) that I often see bundled with pro-electoralism rhetoric, so I preemptively brought in Colin Ward’s article against voting.
What, in your view, needs to be done?
In the large, abolish all authority and hierarchy by popular revolution. If that is impossible, then approximate it as best as possible in the real world using a basis of popular liberatory actions emulating the end goal.
In the small, these delegates could use their power to physically and logistically disrupt the DNC until at least the US ending weapons transfers is secured. For everyone else, support protesters for Gaza in your life, show up to the protests if you can, do direct actions [1] if you can … do nothing if you have to, but most importantly, don’t cooperate with the war machine!
I hope this clarifies what I meant by saying:
Voting is orthogonal to what needs to be done.
Because while voting doesn’t necessarily hurt direct action efforts [2], it doesn’t help either. It’s just a completely independent class of activity. It’s like if, on a typical x-y plane (where the x and y axes are assumed to be orthogonal), we need to move in (let’s say) the positive x direction, and people keep spamming inputs in the y direction.
[1] Just the first part of section J.2, not including J.2.1 and onward. The rest is supplementary.
[2] There is an argument to be made (and I believe the article I cited makes it) that activism for voting takes time and energy that would otherwise be spent on direct action. Also, technically speaking, voting does literally take time away from direct action for the amount of time you’re waiting to vote and actually in the booth, but I’m an engineer so I’m willing to neglect small-valued terms 😆.
- The entire sentence, with different emphasis, is:
It’s not literally everyone, it’s people with power and influence who use their energy to prop up the Democratic machine.
So clearly I’m not irritated at literally all people with power of any form.
Keep in mind, in this thread I am charitably replying to the dishonest suggestion that the average taxpayer has just as much culpability in the genocide in Gaza as someone who goes deep into the halls of power and participates in their process as a delegate.
The power and influence to which my previous comment alluded is that which these delegates fought hard to get, and are now using to prop up the war machine. Again, there is a huge difference in culpability between DNC delegates and the average liberal that’s just trying to get back.
Clearly that kind of nuance cannot be indicated by the meme that started this whole thread, as memes intentionally trade substance for brevity, but my other comments throughout the thread have sufficiently explained that my position is a lot more nuanced than “haha all Democrats all bad”.
- The power and influence I have is basically entirely privilege that I didn’t choose to get and can’t fully reject even though I try my damnedest. I literally don’t even have a job, can’t find one if I tried, no influence on social media other than what you’re reading now, and look what good that’s doing.
Basically the only real power I took for myself in my entire adult life is my education, on which I defer to Bakunin:
Does it follow that I drive back every authority? The thought would never occur to me. When it is a question of boots, I refer the matter to the authority of the cobbler; when it is a question of houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For each special area of knowledge I speak to the appropriate expert. But I allow neither the cobbler nor the architect nor the scientist to impose upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and verification.
I.e. I don’t think that all the power afforded to me by my education is unjust. I am most certainly not using the little power I have to prop up the war machine. (Much to my personal detriment! My line of work is extremely useful to the war machine.) That power which is unjust I take very seriously to reject as best as I can.
Again, it is a ludicrous suggestion that a poor grad student posting memes dunking on the misfortunes of people in power has a comparable power and influence to a delegate at the Democratic National Convention.
Hey while you’re deleting stuff can you delete my student loans?
…
Yeah I thought not.