{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "description": "Copaganda is the most important book I've read in a while both for its impact and its insight. As a working civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis is supremely qualified to expound on the subject of the book's namesake. \"Copaganda convinces people that, sadly, much to our discomfort as caring people, there is no way to solve the serious problems of our society. Having reluctantly come to that conclusion, we now have to expand authoritarian measures to manage those problems through violence. We wish we didn’t have to do this, but we’ve tried everything else\" Karakatsanis absolutely demolishes the credibility of ostensibly well-respected institutions like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and journalists from Vox and elsewhere that have become edge-lord copaganda peddlers. Much like The AI Con skewered the proponents of the covered technology as \"synthetic text extruding machines\", Karakatsanis does the same to the criminal justice system by consistently referring to it as the \"punishment bureaucracy\". Justice isn't served, but the carceral industry is. He backs each point with myriad pertinent anecdotes — from compounding fines used to ruin the lives of the poor, cash bail as a tool to do the same, criminalizing homelessness and addiction rather than treating the root causes, ignoring assaults, domestic violence and other crimes committed by police when calculating statistics, cherry-picking data, ignoring wage theft and corporate crime wholesale, coercing defendants accused of minor offenses to plead out because the \"justice system\" is incapable of handling of cases created to fund municipalities through fines and line the pockets of private companies profiting from institutionalized injustice. It's a brutal, unfair and — arguably — criminal system in its own right. We don't need more police. We absolutely don't need more ICE agents, we don't need more state violence sold as a solution to problems that it exacerbates. We need far fewer police. ICE should be abolished outright. Similar organizations need serious examination and reduction. This system is a harmful bureaucracy if you're looking for an example of one. We need support for low income housing, compassionate approaches to treating addiction and mental health issues, broadly available and freely provided public health care and an actual understanding of the problems we're trying to solve. Institutions professing to have journalistic integrity that engage in peddling copaganda are demonstrating that they have no integrity at all. : Well, once respected and now a joke. : Perhaps respected at some point, now also a joke.",
  "path": "/reading/books/9781620978535/copaganda",
  "publishedAt": "2025-08-20T00:00:00Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:sttgf52vkk46f6yuknvqxvgh/site.standard.publication/self",
  "tags": [
    "journalism",
    "politics",
    "history",
    "nonfiction"
  ],
  "title": "Copaganda"
}