What your original comment suggested was not that you acknowledged the human capacity for violence, which nobody can deny and I am not debating.

The comment implied - and this is an assumption so ingrained in our western society that nobody could blame you for it - that the only thing separating humans from violent, animalistic, or selfish impulses is societal structure and policing.

our institutions are our attempt to crawl out of the jungle

That just isn’t demonstrable, as much as it may feel intuitive. It’s a Hobbian philosophy.

I’m not here to pretend I can convince you otherwise in one comment thread, took me a long time to change my mind on that and I’m not anthropological authority. That’s why I recommend the book, it’s quite eye-opening. At least it was for me.

I encourage you to read Humankind by Rutger Bregman. The notion that humans are inherently animalistic, greedy, and violent has not been supported by the bulk of anthropological study throughout modern history, and his book does a good job of breaking down why there’s such a divide between the perception of so-called “human nature” and the anthropological and sociological evidence.

TLDR: humans aren’t inherently greedy, we respond to our systems and environment more than anything.

“The answer is not to defund the police! It’s to fund them! Fund them!!” - Joe Biden

And then he proceeded to give them money to buy more tear gas canisters and armored vehicles and liberals are surprise Pikachu face-ing when statistics like this come out.

In 100 years (if the earth lasts that long) I hope people look back at police abolition the way we look back at the abolition of slavery: as an obvious step towards a more equitable society.

In fact, the Courts ruled they don’t actually have to protect you at all! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia

EDIT: District Court

Man… the red scare really did a number on the American psyche…

This comment section better remember that you can’t even order from McDonalds anymore without creating an account online. Hell, as of a few weeks ago I can’t even update apps on my personally purchased smart TV without creating a fucking account and letting them link my email to data they already have from Experian (all US companies btw). Tiktok is just a fucking scapegoat so y’all wont push for actual privacy protection laws.

If Tiktok gets sold to a US company nothing will change about their practices the CCP will just buy the data from a 3rd party vendor owned by a US LLC.

Unless they get subpoenad by a district court and the C suite is willing to go to jail for not disclosing it.

Also the US govt already has asked for built-in backdoors to iPhones and the like. They even have highly complex de-anonymization algorithms for data that almost every American with a credit card is giving to their “private” bank so we can have FICO credit scores and venmo.

The private ownership isn’t doing shit for our data protections.