There's this really strange phenomenon happening mostly in many parts of the United States where far-leftists are demanding the police forces to be defunded and abolished, and have been so vocal and influential about it that some cities have actually made significant cuts to police funding, it this being openly being stated as the reason.
Unsurprisingly, whenever this has happened, crime rates have immediately gone up.
The most baffling thing about the phenomenon is that it appears that the people advocating for it don't understand what it actually means in practice, in real life. How it will affect their own life, their own communities, they themselves. They appear to have this strange cognitive separation between the police forces that are "evil" and need to be abolished, and the police forces that they instinctively call whenever they have been the victim of a crime or are in some kind of danger.
This leads to quite hilarious instances where people loudly protesting for abolishing the police will tell each other in all seriousness to call the police if what they think is some "far right extremist" seems to be threatening them or attacking them. In one particular infamous case the people telling each other to call the police, based on how they said it and their tone of voice were quite clearly being serious about it, as if they were saying it instinctively, without even thinking. And, most prominently, without the slightest of realizations of the cognitive dissonance between demanding the police to be abolished, and them immediately calling the police when they feel themselves in danger.
It's like they honestly do not understand what it actually would mean if the police were abolished. It's like in their mind the police they call when they take the phone and dial 911 is not the same police that they demand being abolished. Like they were two completely different entities that have nothing to do with each other. While, of course, still understanding that they are the one and same. It's just that the "abolish the police" mentality goes out the window the very microsecond they are in danger or a crime has been committed to them.
The critics of the far left, especially American conservatives, love to laugh at these things, at the cognitive dissonances, contradictory attitudes, and hypocrisy.
Yet, they shouldn't be laughing that hard, because sometimes they are not much better. Or at least some of them aren't.
There's at least one example of this on the American conservative side that's pretty much in essence identical to the above cognitive dissonance.
You see, many of them heavily oppose taxes. They think that the government must stop taxing people, and that taxes are nothing but theft and robbery by the government, and that the government should have no right to do this. That' it's essentially a legal crime. Some conservatives (eg. some youtubers) time and again talk against taxes and taxation, and how it should be ended.
Yet, these exact same conservatives (and I actually know a few concrete examples that I have seen on YouTube) keep for example the American army and its soldiers in very high regard, and have a lot of respect for them, and understand and state how important the American military is for the safety and independence of the country. In fact, one particular concrete example I know of is a former member of the military himself, and always talks about it with high respect and veneration.
These conservatives also invariably understand the importance of the police in stopping and deterring crime, and are the ones laughing at the far-leftists who are demanding the police to be abolished. They also understand and acknowledge the importance of lawmakers, judges and other officials.
Yet they never seem to stop to think what exactly funds the military, the police, and all these governmental entities. It's a bit like in their mind the military and the police just exist by necessity, and their funding appears from thin air.
There's quite a cognitive dissonance happening here as well.
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