Fierce, Gitaxian Librarian

And body autonomy does include things that you don’t personally like either. I was prompted to write this post after a series of bad takes from progressives, but one of them was re-hashing the Sabrina Carpenter album cover drama with “I don’t think it’s conservative of me to think that the album cover is a bad look when we’ve seen images of women being abused in this way” because I do actually think you’ve failed to understand feminism by projecting your morals onto a woman who was consensually expressing her own autonomy just because she expressed it in a way that you didn’t like or that made you uncomfortable.

Body autonomy also means unhealthy choices. Body autonomy also means regret rates. Body autonomy also means freedom of sexuality. Body autonomy also means mutilation. If you believe body autonomy has limitations and exceptions, then your feminism is most likely surface level.

More people starting to learn about and acknowledge Juneteenth? That’s great! That’s a step in the right direction. The people doing that do not control police funding.

A major brand revamping its product to remove a mascot that was based on a blackface drag character from the early 1900s? That’s great! Like with Pride, it shows that companies are willing to adapt to create a more positive environment, even if they’re just doing it for profit. But! That brand does not control police funding.

Various tv and youtube celebrities acknowledging and apologizing for their racist acts and removing that content? Black actors being cast as black characters? Good! Pop culture becomes less racist and hopefully makes space for more diverse voices in the future. However: celebrities and cartoonists do not control police funding.

STOP pretending your current pet cause is the be-all end-all of fixing racism. These changes are all good, and all made on an individual level by people across the board. WHY would you discourage that. WHY would you pretend that is nothing.

By which I don’t mean “don’t try to defund the police.”

I just mean, “something as huge as defunding the police—MUCH LESS abolishing them and redistributing their duties more sensibly—is a multi-year if not a multi-DECADE project.

remember everyone...

thursday watch: the conditions for thursday are here, but a thursday incident has not yet been confirmed

BUT

I LIKED Harry Potter. I think pretending I didn’t like Harry Potter is a bad idea. Because acknowledging that I liked Harry Potter is acknowledging that things people make don’t come with labels reading “look out. I was made by a shit person.”

Look, the crux of the book and prison abolition more broadly isn’t that “people should be allowed to rape and murder, whatever” its that “the prison industrial complex doesn’t solve the problem of rape and murder, and in fact inflicts far more harm on society than good.”

A lot of people commit crimes and are never caught or charged.

Shouldn’t we as a society be trying to address that? Isn’t it better to prevent crimes from happening?

And having *all those people* incarcerated within a violent system is not a nuetral situation. It is active state violence.

We are talking about the entire prison system and the millions of people it really actually affects.

I’m saying that it is immoral, unethical, and unreasonable to continue a system that harms so so so so many people, and that we should instead fund alternative forms of justice. If your only argument is “but I’ve imagined a tiny hypothetical group of people who can ONLY be stopped by the current prison systems existence and NO proposed alternative will work for them my mind, and punishing them in the only way I think works is more important than anything else, so we cant” then…you aren’t having an open and honest discussion.

‘a few people might misuse it so no one should have it!’

Yeah?

And?

My tax dollars already go to cops and road infrastructure that is actively hostile to anything not a car, two things I would really rather not pay for.

I’d happily take every red cent that goes to both those bullshit things and put it into welfare if it was up to me. Welfare in it’s worst form is doing more good than cops and dangerous strodes on their best fucking days.

Jails and prisons don’t work and tossing more money and hope and human souls at it ain’t fucking fixing it.

People who got thrown in jail for laughably small drug charges or mental health problems don’t deserve to be raped and forced into slavery because some slimy government official thinks being poor is a moral failing or you’re concerned about the tiny percentage of harden criminals we may not be punishing properly.

We’ve already explained to you how it’s not a ‘small minority’ of innocent people being thrown into systems of intense violence @needabetternamelater, so you’re fine with a considerable chunk of the American population being forcefully removed from their families and getting gang raped over bullshit offenses?

That’s kinda fucked morally.

How about we just make the world a less shitty place for everyone simply for the sake of making it less shit for everyone?

Criminals are still people.

It’s not bad actually to treat them like people.

“Then the number of prisons should also be tiny!”

“No, it should be 0.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Ángela Davis keeps asking me why I think it’s necessary!”

“Cool. What was your answer then, and what did it change to? Mine is still ‘some people are going to keep hurting people and the only solution is to keep those people away from others.’ I’d love to better understand the alternative.”

“You don’t understand that lots of people are in prison for minor offenses!”

We literally KNOW what the people many of us want to imprison are doing, and what the recommended sentences under the current system are. We can look them up!

But somehow when we ask abolitionists what the new process is and what we should expect to result from it they just go “stop derailing.”

My dude I have friends who would like to make art for a living and I do not want moguls drugging or even just pressuring them ever.

What evidence do we have that prisons reduce the amount of overall sexual assault in our society? (Or, given the prevalence of sexual assault within prisons, do they actually INCREASE the number of victims?)

It’s very easy to point at the absolute worst offender imaginable and go “well what about him?” It’s important to remember that it’s estimated that less than 1% of rapists ever see the inside of a prison, and in the meantime, that system is creating new victims and perpetuating wild state violence against a shit ton of people that *arent* Diddy.

So yes, when the argument is “until prison abolitionists can lay out a foolproof plan that perfectly tackles this problem that our current system is miserably failing at, we will not entertain the premise at all, regardless of all the OTHER ways it would measurably improve things” I will, in fact, call it derailing.

Especially, *especially*, when you *presuppose* that any solution other than prison would automatically fail for your worst case scenario offender. I say counseling and community service and restraining orders, I say scheduled check ins or reparation hearings, and it doesn’t matter if that WOULD work for 99% of people, because you will say “well that wouldn’t work on DIDDY” and act like there’s not merit at all to the premise on a societal level.

And I think part of that is some fundamental misimagining for what prison abolition work actually looks like. We aren’t proposing we close all the prisons tomorrow and just let people go with no structures or supports in place and hope for the best. Abolition work is the long grind to build those alternative systems, change sentencing guidelines, advocate for reforms with the long term end goal of having a prisonless society. By the time the last prison closed, the systems to replace it will be robust and comprehensive. (And yeah, it probably won’t work for everyone. But will it work for more people than the current system? Will it cause less harm than the current system? Will it lead to overall FEWER assaults and murders and violence than the current system?)

Thats where I get the idea that some people are either just not going to be rehabilitated or that some people are just going to be so incredibly difficult to convince to break a habit of harming others that people give up.

I want you to convince me. I want to believe I can do it.

I hear every day of my working life that with some people you just can’t.

Please prove me wrong. PLEASE. If you can do that, I can argue no one should ever be barred from the shelter where I work.

Here’s a point that I feel like I did make but didn’t say directly- no solution will work for 100% of people, and it’s frankly an insane standard to hold up for this kind of work. I don’t believe EVERYONE can be rehabilitated, but I also think that’s an asinine reason to support a system that does so much harm to so many people who could be.

The actual metric of success here is “would it be better than the current system” and looking at basically any country that is further in that direction than we are, even if they aren’t 100% prisonless, suggests that…yes. restorative systems, counseling and community service and reparations and social work monitoring and job training and social services and non-punitive addiction care DO lead to better outcomes than a system where any breech of law gets you chucked in a hole forever.

Why am I saying it? Because your side says there must be no prisons. If there are no prisons, then EVERYONE, REGARDLESS of what they’ve done or how rational they are about it, cannot be removed from the community.

My position is that I cannot assert that everyone is ready to be reintegrated into the community right away. I think this because I believe I have met some that are not.

Where I agree with you is that this is a very small proportion of the people in the world, and therefore not many prisons would exist in my utopia either.

Which means we agree on most things. The one place where I don’t is I can only get to “the vast majority of prisons should be closed down.” I can’t get from that to all.

Ángela Davis apparently got you to all. How’d she do that? What convinced you?

How’d you take that last step, when like any of the rest of us you know what powerful cruel people are capable of?

I get to answer question after question after question for your ever moving goal posts, but I’ve asked 1 question, several times and worded in different ways, and not gotten an answer from you at any point.

What is your evidence that the current system reduces the amount of violent crime? What evidence do you have that a prison does more good than harm?

This is actually a legitimate public health/public safety position (legalization of drugs is essentially the identical argument - that the harm caused by recreational drug use is an acceptable price to pay for reducing the harm caused by the “war on drugs” - and so were the debates over covid lockdowns) that abolitionists could honestly discuss and debate if they were being intellectually honest about things. It’s the whole premise of harm reduction, which is about deliberately enabling and encouraging some types of harm in order to prevent greater harm.

Yes, that’s what it sounds to me like the position is, and why I disagree with it.

We can ALMOSTget rid of prison (defined, again, as “a place we put people we deem literally too unsafe to allow in our communities” which means A LOT of people who current,y get prison won’t, ideally) without telling rape victims (or other crime victims which I am) to suck it up, but we can’t totally do away with it.

So that’s my position.

You have not provided any evidence at all that prisons reduce the number of rapes or any violent crimes in our society. You acknowledged, in fact, that prisons *dont* reduce crime.

In my FIRST reply to you today, I said-

Especially, *especially*, when you *presuppose* that any solution other than prison would automatically fail for your worst case scenario offender. I say counseling and community service and restraining orders, I say scheduled check ins or reparation hearings, and it doesn’t matter if that WOULD work for 99% of people, because you will say “well that wouldn’t work on DIDDY” and act like there’s not merit at all to the premise on a societal level.

But here you are, acting as though my argument is this grotesque cavalier dismissal of victims. That Im proposing that rapists have free reign to do whatever to whomever, when that is clearly and demonstrably not what I said from the very fucking begininng.

For what? Clout? Because you think it makes you look smart to agree with someone spouting such a transparently false strawman?

This more than anything is why my strong suspicion is there’s compartmentalizing going on here. Rapists are outliers and they don’t matter—until you remind someone that most people on the planet know at least one survivor, if they’re not one themselves.

That for all that was horribly, twistedly, awfully wrong with the second wave that birthed white feminism and terfs, they were RIGHT to point out that most rapists are regular guys, and don’t think of the way they hurt people as wrong.

You remind people of all this and then… all of a sudden it’s “I never said let rapists have their freedom!”

I didn’t say rapists are outliers and don’t matter. I said that prisons do not reduce the amount of rapes that happen, only punish about 1% of rapists, and do immense harm all while being ineffectual at actually helping victims. So Ineffectual, in fact, that their existence *makes more victims*

You yourself said that prisons *dont reduce crime.* we agree that all the sorts of reforms that prison abolition advocates for *does reduce crime.* acknowledging that no solution will 100% prevent rape, but that prison abolition will do a better job of preventing rape and reducing recidivism than prisons, doesn’t mean that I “think rapists don’t count”.

Think about that story that was all over the news right after Dobbs, where a ten year old girl raped by her father needed an abortion and had to go to another state.

What should happen to that dad?

I think he should be kept away not just from his daughter, but also from society at large.

You seem to think he should be kept away from people too… but only as an interim measure. Ideally he gets… let me scroll up… “house arrest, counseling, or other intervention programs.”

How long of an interim do we take him away from people vs. not doing so? How do we know when we’re ready to make the shift?

He’s a person, regardless of the evil he’s done. No one in this discussion disputes that criminals are people. The issue is whether institutionalization is the kind of thing that’s so cruel no people should ever be subjected to it.

You’re arguing that it is, so over time it will be phased out fully. I’m arguing that while as currently constituted, prison is indeed too cruel, the basic idea of separating a dangerous person from the larger community is not inherently cruel, so we’ll still have “prisons,” meaning “places we send people we deem too threatening to let roam freely.”

Therefore, my question is: If prison is fundamentally too cruel and unusual for anyone, even someone who’s willing to rape his daughter, what do we do with him? House arrest is right out if that’s where the kid lives. How do we move him?

Where’d and when did she move the goalposts, baby boo? She didn’t; you’re a liar pure and simple!

Are you gonna ever address the topic or you just gonna make up reasons for why you’re not?

Yes, we all agree that a great many people do not belong in prison and would be better served by other solutions, as would society.

But–every time the issue of hard-core, unrepentant offenders who are dangerous to society is brought up, vigorous handwaving and whataboutism commences.

There’s always the ancient, classic, and medieval solution to such people when you don’t have prisons: execute them. Somehow I don’t think that’s what prison abolitionists are arguing for.

Where to me, “prisoner” CAN mean “young black guy who likes grass” but it can also mean “dad who molests his kid” or “cult leader who convinced all the women to put out for him” or “guy who ran the Ponzi scheme,” and those are sufficiently different that an appropriate response to the first is not going to look the same as an appropriate response to the second, which in turn is not going to look the same as an appropriate response to the third.

The one point where we disagree is that, if we do implement all their proposed measures and there remains a small population of people that continue to perpetrate violence and cannot be rehabilitated…I don’t believe imprisoning them is a non-option. I don’t believe that imprisoning someone (in a safe facility where their needs, including social and entertainment needs, are met) is so horrific that it can’t even be considered an option. I also don’t believe that prison rape is an unavoidable fact, as so many people here insist.

If there is a non box putting solution I’d like to hear it. I’m just not cool with dead mice on Kate’s porch, yannowhadimean?

The difference between them and me seems to be:

Them: Violence against women is horrific! But we live in a society that’s not primed to take is seriously, so no one punishes it harshly. Since no one does that anyway, we should stop punishing everyone.

Me: We live in a society that does not take violence against women seriously! This is bad! We’re on the same page there. But if it’s bad to not take it seriously enough, I worry that no longer punishing it will make the problem worse than only half punishing it.

Not punishing it consistently sends the message that some of us kind of mind, but not very much, which supports rape culture,

Look, the crux of the book and prison abolition more broadly isn’t that “people should be allowed to rape and murder, whatever” its that “the prison industrial complex doesn’t solve the problem of rape and murder, and in fact inflicts far more harm on society than good.”

A lot of people commit crimes and are never caught or charged.

Shouldn’t we as a society be trying to address that? Isn’t it better to prevent crimes from happening?

And having *all those people* incarcerated within a violent system is not a nuetral situation. It is active state violence.

We are talking about the entire prison system and the millions of people it really actually affects.

I’m saying that it is immoral, unethical, and unreasonable to continue a system that harms so so so so many people, and that we should instead fund alternative forms of justice. If your only argument is “but I’ve imagined a tiny hypothetical group of people who can ONLY be stopped by the current prison systems existence and NO proposed alternative will work for them my mind, and punishing them in the only way I think works is more important than anything else, so we cant” then…you aren’t having an open and honest discussion.

‘a few people might misuse it so no one should have it!’

Yeah?

And?

My tax dollars already go to cops and road infrastructure that is actively hostile to anything not a car, two things I would really rather not pay for.

I’d happily take every red cent that goes to both those bullshit things and put it into welfare if it was up to me. Welfare in it’s worst form is doing more good than cops and dangerous strodes on their best fucking days.

Jails and prisons don’t work and tossing more money and hope and human souls at it ain’t fucking fixing it.

People who got thrown in jail for laughably small drug charges or mental health problems don’t deserve to be raped and forced into slavery because some slimy government official thinks being poor is a moral failing or you’re concerned about the tiny percentage of harden criminals we may not be punishing properly.

We’ve already explained to you how it’s not a ‘small minority’ of innocent people being thrown into systems of intense violence @needabetternamelater, so you’re fine with a considerable chunk of the American population being forcefully removed from their families and getting gang raped over bullshit offenses?

That’s kinda fucked morally.

How about we just make the world a less shitty place for everyone simply for the sake of making it less shit for everyone?

Criminals are still people.

It’s not bad actually to treat them like people.

“Then the number of prisons should also be tiny!”

“No, it should be 0.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Ángela Davis keeps asking me why I think it’s necessary!”

“Cool. What was your answer then, and what did it change to? Mine is still ‘some people are going to keep hurting people and the only solution is to keep those people away from others.’ I’d love to better understand the alternative.”

“You don’t understand that lots of people are in prison for minor offenses!”

We literally KNOW what the people many of us want to imprison are doing, and what the recommended sentences under the current system are. We can look them up!

But somehow when we ask abolitionists what the new process is and what we should expect to result from it they just go “stop derailing.”

My dude I have friends who would like to make art for a living and I do not want moguls drugging or even just pressuring them ever.

What evidence do we have that prisons reduce the amount of overall sexual assault in our society? (Or, given the prevalence of sexual assault within prisons, do they actually INCREASE the number of victims?)

It’s very easy to point at the absolute worst offender imaginable and go “well what about him?” It’s important to remember that it’s estimated that less than 1% of rapists ever see the inside of a prison, and in the meantime, that system is creating new victims and perpetuating wild state violence against a shit ton of people that *arent* Diddy.

So yes, when the argument is “until prison abolitionists can lay out a foolproof plan that perfectly tackles this problem that our current system is miserably failing at, we will not entertain the premise at all, regardless of all the OTHER ways it would measurably improve things” I will, in fact, call it derailing.

Especially, *especially*, when you *presuppose* that any solution other than prison would automatically fail for your worst case scenario offender. I say counseling and community service and restraining orders, I say scheduled check ins or reparation hearings, and it doesn’t matter if that WOULD work for 99% of people, because you will say “well that wouldn’t work on DIDDY” and act like there’s not merit at all to the premise on a societal level.

And I think part of that is some fundamental misimagining for what prison abolition work actually looks like. We aren’t proposing we close all the prisons tomorrow and just let people go with no structures or supports in place and hope for the best. Abolition work is the long grind to build those alternative systems, change sentencing guidelines, advocate for reforms with the long term end goal of having a prisonless society. By the time the last prison closed, the systems to replace it will be robust and comprehensive. (And yeah, it probably won’t work for everyone. But will it work for more people than the current system? Will it cause less harm than the current system? Will it lead to overall FEWER assaults and murders and violence than the current system?)

Thats where I get the idea that some people are either just not going to be rehabilitated or that some people are just going to be so incredibly difficult to convince to break a habit of harming others that people give up.

I want you to convince me. I want to believe I can do it.

I hear every day of my working life that with some people you just can’t.

Please prove me wrong. PLEASE. If you can do that, I can argue no one should ever be barred from the shelter where I work.

Here’s a point that I feel like I did make but didn’t say directly- no solution will work for 100% of people, and it’s frankly an insane standard to hold up for this kind of work. I don’t believe EVERYONE can be rehabilitated, but I also think that’s an asinine reason to support a system that does so much harm to so many people who could be.

The actual metric of success here is “would it be better than the current system” and looking at basically any country that is further in that direction than we are, even if they aren’t 100% prisonless, suggests that…yes. restorative systems, counseling and community service and reparations and social work monitoring and job training and social services and non-punitive addiction care DO lead to better outcomes than a system where any breech of law gets you chucked in a hole forever.

Why am I saying it? Because your side says there must be no prisons. If there are no prisons, then EVERYONE, REGARDLESS of what they’ve done or how rational they are about it, cannot be removed from the community.

My position is that I cannot assert that everyone is ready to be reintegrated into the community right away. I think this because I believe I have met some that are not.

Where I agree with you is that this is a very small proportion of the people in the world, and therefore not many prisons would exist in my utopia either.

Which means we agree on most things. The one place where I don’t is I can only get to “the vast majority of prisons should be closed down.” I can’t get from that to all.

Ángela Davis apparently got you to all. How’d she do that? What convinced you?

How’d you take that last step, when like any of the rest of us you know what powerful cruel people are capable of?

I get to answer question after question after question for your ever moving goal posts, but I’ve asked 1 question, several times and worded in different ways, and not gotten an answer from you at any point.

What is your evidence that the current system reduces the amount of violent crime? What evidence do you have that a prison does more good than harm?

This is actually a legitimate public health/public safety position (legalization of drugs is essentially the identical argument - that the harm caused by recreational drug use is an acceptable price to pay for reducing the harm caused by the “war on drugs” - and so were the debates over covid lockdowns) that abolitionists could honestly discuss and debate if they were being intellectually honest about things. It’s the whole premise of harm reduction, which is about deliberately enabling and encouraging some types of harm in order to prevent greater harm.

Yes, that’s what it sounds to me like the position is, and why I disagree with it.

We can ALMOSTget rid of prison (defined, again, as “a place we put people we deem literally too unsafe to allow in our communities” which means A LOT of people who current,y get prison won’t, ideally) without telling rape victims (or other crime victims which I am) to suck it up, but we can’t totally do away with it.

So that’s my position.

You have not provided any evidence at all that prisons reduce the number of rapes or any violent crimes in our society. You acknowledged, in fact, that prisons *dont* reduce crime.

In my FIRST reply to you today, I said-

Especially, *especially*, when you *presuppose* that any solution other than prison would automatically fail for your worst case scenario offender. I say counseling and community service and restraining orders, I say scheduled check ins or reparation hearings, and it doesn’t matter if that WOULD work for 99% of people, because you will say “well that wouldn’t work on DIDDY” and act like there’s not merit at all to the premise on a societal level.

But here you are, acting as though my argument is this grotesque cavalier dismissal of victims. That Im proposing that rapists have free reign to do whatever to whomever, when that is clearly and demonstrably not what I said from the very fucking begininng.

For what? Clout? Because you think it makes you look smart to agree with someone spouting such a transparently false strawman?

This more than anything is why my strong suspicion is there’s compartmentalizing going on here. Rapists are outliers and they don’t matter—until you remind someone that most people on the planet know at least one survivor, if they’re not one themselves.

That for all that was horribly, twistedly, awfully wrong with the second wave that birthed white feminism and terfs, they were RIGHT to point out that most rapists are regular guys, and don’t think of the way they hurt people as wrong.

You remind people of all this and then… all of a sudden it’s “I never said let rapists have their freedom!”

I didn’t say rapists are outliers and don’t matter. I said that prisons do not reduce the amount of rapes that happen, only punish about 1% of rapists, and do immense harm all while being ineffectual at actually helping victims. So Ineffectual, in fact, that their existence *makes more victims*

You yourself said that prisons *dont reduce crime.* we agree that all the sorts of reforms that prison abolition advocates for *does reduce crime.* acknowledging that no solution will 100% prevent rape, but that prison abolition will do a better job of preventing rape and reducing recidivism than prisons, doesn’t mean that I “think rapists don’t count”.

Think about that story that was all over the news right after Dobbs, where a ten year old girl raped by her father needed an abortion and had to go to another state.

What should happen to that dad?

I think he should be kept away not just from his daughter, but also from society at large.

You seem to think he should be kept away from people too… but only as an interim measure. Ideally he gets… let me scroll up… “house arrest, counseling, or other intervention programs.”

How long of an interim do we take him away from people vs. not doing so? How do we know when we’re ready to make the shift?

He’s a person, regardless of the evil he’s done. No one in this discussion disputes that criminals are people. The issue is whether institutionalization is the kind of thing that’s so cruel no people should ever be subjected to it.

You’re arguing that it is, so over time it will be phased out fully. I’m arguing that while as currently constituted, prison is indeed too cruel, the basic idea of separating a dangerous person from the larger community is not inherently cruel, so we’ll still have “prisons,” meaning “places we send people we deem too threatening to let roam freely.”

Therefore, my question is: If prison is fundamentally too cruel and unusual for anyone, even someone who’s willing to rape his daughter, what do we do with him? House arrest is right out if that’s where the kid lives. How do we move him?

Where’d and when did she move the goalposts, baby boo? She didn’t; you’re a liar pure and simple!

Are you gonna ever address the topic or you just gonna make up reasons for why you’re not?

Yes, we all agree that a great many people do not belong in prison and would be better served by other solutions, as would society.

But–every time the issue of hard-core, unrepentant offenders who are dangerous to society is brought up, vigorous handwaving and whataboutism commences.

There’s always the ancient, classic, and medieval solution to such people when you don’t have prisons: execute them. Somehow I don’t think that’s what prison abolitionists are arguing for.

Where to me, “prisoner” CAN mean “young black guy who likes grass” but it can also mean “dad who molests his kid” or “cult leader who convinced all the women to put out for him” or “guy who ran the Ponzi scheme,” and those are sufficiently different that an appropriate response to the first is not going to look the same as an appropriate response to the second, which in turn is not going to look the same as an appropriate response to the third.

The one point where we disagree is that, if we do implement all their proposed measures and there remains a small population of people that continue to perpetrate violence and cannot be rehabilitated…I don’t believe imprisoning them is a non-option. I don’t believe that imprisoning someone (in a safe facility where their needs, including social and entertainment needs, are met) is so horrific that it can’t even be considered an option. I also don’t believe that prison rape is an unavoidable fact, as so many people here insist.

If there is a non box putting solution I’d like to hear it. I’m just not cool with dead mice on Kate’s porch, yannowhadimean?

Turns out you can roll a 7 on a d6