Shrieks and heads for nearest small hole in the wall? 
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True story. I used to own eight rats in an enormous multi-level cage in the living room. Iâd leave the cage door open because there were platforms on the outside of the sides they could play around on. Also a box on the roof they could play in. But they couldnât reach the ground.
Anyway, I left the door open one day and came down a few hours later to find no rats. Whatâs fuzzy and invisible? No rats.
Long story short, they had found a way down to the floor, headed four feet over to the sofa, chewed a hole in it and hid inside. All eight of them. I made a sound with my lips and called, âRa-a-ats! Ra-a-ats!â And most of them came out to say hi. The rest came out when I smacked my hand against the side of the sofa.
And from that point on, I literally had a ratty old sofa.
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More âbackwards round the roundaboutâ. Certainly in the wet.
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Reformism doesnât work; it just makes our problems more difficult to see, perpetually delays change until some unspecified date in the future, and legitimizes the very same power structures that are the sources of our problems. At best, reforms grant certain privileges to one group at the cost of another (e.g. capitalism responded to labor reforms in the 19th and early 20th centuries by exporting the same old brutal methods to developing countries).
In this case, modern day police departments developed out of slave patrols and strike breakers. Your post suggests that we can and should go back to some more ideal status quo. Unfortunately there was never a point when this ideal world existed.
I could get behind a reformist movement that made demands followed by, âOr else,â but reformism generally has the effect of defanging movements for change and driving participants toward electoral politics, the âgraveyard of movements.â
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That higher standard could start with getting rid of all the ones weâve got now for being complicit in the current fucked up system, and starting over again from scratch, maybe hiring more people from the social services, and less psychopathic roid-heads this time around.
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Related:
Cops perform anal probes on innocent man after routine traffic stop.
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What do they say about power again?
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Itâs useless. They just wonât give a shit.
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Thatâs kinda defeatist. We could take the first, and probably most monumental step, of greatly limiting qualified immunity. Itâs a single piece of legislation. Repealing it might be a bad idea, but greatly reducing the scope should be possible. Itâs a move that could be popular for politicians to run on as it keeps those authority figures on a pedestal, but offers opportunity for vengeance when they break the law they swear to enforce (choice of wording for this sentence is very deliberate). Seems like something even Republicans could handle pulling off.
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