> Huge swaths of police officers in this country are federal police officers - that was my only point.

right which is why "defund the police" is once again such a ridiculously overgeneralized thing to say! there's 17985 police agencies in the country, which includes federal, state, county, and city officers. each one of these things is wildly different from the other, and you're just throwing them all together and saying "defund 'em all," as though that could possibly be a solution to such a complex problem.

here's where the miscommunication lies, I believe:

put aside for a second why "reform the police" isn't a great slogan to get anything done (I agree btw)—let's say the idea of reforming police corruption had never been floated before, and then when "defund the police" came about, instead the slogan was "reform the police." in this hypothetical world, I would have much, much less of an issue with the idea of collecting all the police from all the disparate parts of the country and lumping them together. the reason for this is that if you live in a small town with a small local police department that is well-liked and good and fair and all that, then the locals could very easily agree that "the police," in general, should be reformed, but that the local cops are doing fine as is. you wouldn't be choosing them to "pick a side" ("for the police" or "against the police"), you're merely asking people to acknowledge that, in many places in the country, the police are not as just and good as your local cops, and as long as we can all agree that that's the case, then we can maybe start to work together to make things better for everyone.

instead, when you say "defund the police," you're alienating these same people who don't have a problem at all with their local police, especially in smaller towns and cities, because you're essentially instilling cognitive dissonance upon them, asking them to hold both "all police should be defunded" and "but idk I think my local cops are alright" in their heads at the same time. cognitive dissonance in values like this leads to political/ideological zealotry which doesn't accomplish anything other than dividing people and making everyone feel worse, while nothing really changes because your movement's explicitly stated goals (even if you don't actually mean "defund," it's what you're saying) are beyond the pale for many, many people. this is how you bifurcate and demoralize a population, and it's working fantastically.

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response to below comment:

> This is textbook moving the goalpost. Your original point was that we shouldn't make general statements about police, which is clearly nonsense. If you have other problems with "defund the police" as a slogan that's a separate issue.

how are any goalposts being moved when my initial post ended with

> has anything good come from this pattern of overgeneralizing and then generating purposefully disingenuous propagandistic terms to force people to "pick a side"?

it's called establishing a position and then building it up over the course of debate, I thought I made my overarching position here pretty clear: propagandistic overgeneralizations and slogans specifically designed to inflame and divide rather than unite are the single biggest threat we face as a nation today, and are quite rapidly bringing about the decline of the Republic as our perception of reality splits roughly in two.