the real-world alternatives abolition advocates are calling for
What are you thinking of? A lot of alternatives (including de-criminalizing certain drug use, for instance) do work very well for some cases. I think the trouble starts when you ask what we should do in cases where those alternatives fail.
"Abolish ICE" is something I'd stick by. ICE didn't exist before 2002 and it's not as if the country was falling apart. Customs is a reasonable thing to have, but we already have Customs and Border Patrol. There are legitimate reasons you'd want to arrest and deport someone (a decent government might do so for someone wanted on an ICC warrant), but you can have the FBI do that. ICE adds nothing besides the capacity to do deportations at scale, which is a good thing to oppose.
If you can't handle a kid yelling at you, you shouldn't have a gun
I dont like state oppression being used against me and would like it to be used on my class enemies.
We have to stop conflating this with abolition. If I want to abolish slavery, or abolish the death penalty, it's not that I want to be the one to decide who is subjected to those things, it's that I don't want anyone to be subjected to those things.
That's abolition, everything else is a degree of reform.
Prison abolition is an example discussed in the episode. Consider the maximalist position: abolition abolition, the idea that no type of government, even one leftists control, should put people actually guilty of serious crimes in even the most humane of prisons. I don't think rejecting that (especially as part of an immediate platform) is tailism. It's not popular, sure, but that's not why it should be rejected. It should be rejected because it's a bad idea for the foreseeable future. No AES state does that, for instance. Committing to a radical idea and not shying away from it only makes sense if that radical idea is a good one in the first place.
And even if you disagree with that entire paragraph, we have to be able to talk about it among people broadly to the left of the Democratic Party without rapidly descending to insults. I sometimes see the approach of jumping straight to berating people if they don't immediately agree. There's some value to that approach with actual reactionaries, but if we apply it even to people who see Democrats as right wing we're well on the road to "too small and unpopular to accomplish anything." At some point you have to go through the effort of trying to convince someone you're right.
Even successful movements are open to criticism, and the 2020-era movement was a lot less successful than anyone here would have liked.
You don't want to just do tailism, but you also don't want to be so far from the masses that you remain too small and unpopular to accomplish anything. There has to be a way to talk about striking this balance.
"Staged" could mean:
All of which would involve a real bullet actually killing someone, just not Trump.
I'm skeptical of it being staged, but at some point incompetence is so extreme it becomes too suspicious to take at face value. How do you let a guy with a rifle park on an open rooftop anywhere near a presidential speech?
A lot of suicide attempts are hesitant, right?
Or maybe they just wanted to go for a nice dip
That logic is sound enough. Any large movement will involve compromise.
Where it breaks down is when they attempt to later brow-beat the left with the exact opposite argument. "The swing voter may literally vote for Trump if you don't compromise, but you can't similarly threaten to withhold your vote otherwise you're basically voting for Trump." And that's not even getting into what they want to "compromise" on.
Threatening to withhold votes over an issue is a tactic that's been proven successful. It been no small part of dragging the Republican Party right. They just don't want us to do it.
Prometheus? What ever happened to that guy?
Slurs for obscure European communities that only became white late in the 20th century