demilitarize

I could have sworn we have special obligations to Japan, as part of our demanding them to demilitarize.

Something like "demilitarize the police" would likely have worked much better.

Or we can shut that all down, demilitarize across the board and redirect our priorities to domestic social welfare. In short, we can start behaving like a normal nation again.

I trust the manufacturer of these rolling privacy violations to be honest about their health risks about as much as I'd trust Dick Cheney to demilitarize the US government. Which is to say, negative quantities of trust.

It won't mean they get a conviction, and it doesn't mean the police force will reorganize, demilitarize, retrain to use less force, or become not racist. And the other side hasn't de-escalated either, with the president deploying the military.

It’s to cut their budget and demilitarize their roles while boosting social services. This is a rational goal, but we can already see one possible unintended outcome if the people of Seattle perceive that traditional police services are declining.

The author does build up a respectable synthesis of these ideas, but then in a sentence or two comes to the vague conclusion that we must demilitarize internet consumption. Unfortunately, this second, major thought is not as well-developed.

Actually changing systems - and arguably defunding the police is the wrong mantra, inaccurate; demilitarize the police, yes. That doesn't mean we should give into unreasonable options.

But these rioting mobs won't stand a chance changing these "bullying" tactics or getting the police to "demilitarize". In some part, the protective gear actually decreases the need of applying violence against protesters, because the officers don't have to defend themselves as "actively" when trying to control a crowd.

Then only one single crazy national-leader has to not actually demilitarize, and he can then conquer anyone who truly did demilitarize. Which means that the logical thing for anyone is not to demilitarize. Which means that the overall result is we don't demilitarize.

Another option, of course, is to agree that there are some things that might be worthy of a penalty like shame rather than a legal penalty, and demilitarize more of human behavior. That is: a better alternative is to convince people you disagree with, even lead boycotts if you must, but don't use your time in power to increase the power of the government ...

What it misses is that if you offer your message in more technical language - demilitarize or deunionize - to avoid culture-porn reductionism, the people whose interests will suffer under that proposal will just come out with a pornographic caricature of it and oppose that. A good example of this is the moral panic over transgender people in public restrooms.

A side effect of that would be that we could make a very legitimate argument to demilitarize the police force, if a crowd is unarmed, the police should not need guns, tasers and pepper spray are adequate. Likewise, we would have more recordings of police interactions and be able to lower those corruption rates, as it is now they are currently resisting allowing people to film them.

Furthermore, the United States military is a massive CO2 emitter, so this would likely drive the dual deficits into even more dangerous territory because, let's face it, we're not going to demilitarize in any meaningful way.