(CW: child sexual abuse, incest, and rape)

  1. Abolitionism or defunding the police. I’m no fan of prisons, policing, or psychiatric wards, but abolitionists need to be clear about what the alternatives are. People aren’t going to trust you if you think “restorative justice” is going to stop murderers, rapists, and child molesters. (I don’t think restorative justice would have stopped my paedophilic child-raping father from attacking me when I was a preschooler. There’s no restoring someone who destroys a child’s innocence.) Rapists, serial killers, and child molesters do not deserve to be in the community. Would you want Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Kaczynski, or Ted Bundy walking free to rape, murder, and torture more victims? I don’t, either. You need to present a solution for policing, forced psychiatric holds, and prisons that is free from logical holes and written in plain language. So far I haven’t seen anything of the sort, even though I’m sympathetic to their cause (with the exception of exceptionally violent criminals).
  2. Decolonial/decolonise. I’ve complained about this term before, since it’s often used to defend authoritarian groups and regimes like Hamas, the Taliban, and North Korea. But it’s ambiguous: do you mean creating systems that include peoples who were or are formerly imperial subjects? Or do you mean that you want to kill everyone who belongs to the coloniser’s ethnic group, regardless of their individual political beliefs (Hamas)? Or are you trying to establish a new form of ethnic supremacy to replace the previous one (North Korea)?
  3. Anticapitalism. What do you mean? Do you mean doing away with the market economy? Or private business? Or do you mean using barter instead of currency? For me, anticapitalism refers to socialist economic systems in which the general public (or a government representing the public) controls some or all of the means of production. Goods and services can be provided by governments, individuals, and unions, depending on the form of socialism. Socialism on its own doesn’t lead to equity (cases in point: USSR and my favourite whipping boy, North Korea).