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In this Discussion
- Death August 2014
- distant_shoe September 2014
- Dr_William_Hayward August 2014
- flossy_log_lady September 2014
- kdawg September 2014
- Leland August 2014
- Matthew September 2014
- MirandaJuly September 2014
- Schlabe September 2014
- swamp_knobbler_mahan August 2014
- ThickeningAgent August 2014
- YoursTruly August 2014
Ferguson
Damn y'all. I'm really torn up about what's going down in Missouri right now. WHERE'S OBAMA?
Comments
I think there is a LOT of tut-tutting in the media and in other circles besides ours, about the "violence" of the protesters. The two molotovs that were thrown. "what are the police supposed to do," etc.
Just like how a Palestinian kid pitching a rock justifies a state military assault on an entire race of people.
It's the rhetoric of bullies, but it's also I think due to people's DESPERATE desire to side with power. If you start believing that power isn't in the right, then where does that leave you?? In a totalitarian dictatorship, a military state, etc., and no one wants to realize that they are living (and supporting, with their work and money and votes) a military dictatorship or whatever. So it's easier to just "believe" that the police "must have a reason." It's easier to just believe that anyone who gets on the wrong side of the police (who represent Good and Justice and Order) must have been doing something wrong. I think we see it again and again, how much people want to cling to the slimmest belief that the State can't do anything that is truly wrong.
Also people are just incredibly racist, straight-up. I think MILLIONS of people genuinely believe that black people are animalistic and "feral" (police chief's wife's word) and that the police are just doing their best to contain a lot of barbaric looting.
it's dark
Reading the comments on a bunch of the livestreams and videos, yes, about half the country is racist as fuck.
"I assume all gun rights activists are headed to Ferguson to defend the citizenry against this government overstep." Good tweet from Jaclyn. White conservatives don't care about black people. Bundy's militia can point assault weapons at feds and totally get away with it, but black kids throw rocks and maybe one molotov cocktail and get a fully militarized police force deployed.
The environment's probably more fucked now than in human history, I'll give you that.
https://vine.co/v/MYXgJYxlX9h
Like.. you have the brain of a 5 year old. You shouldn't be given a gun!
https://twitter.com/AntonioFrench
Eloquent and compassionate reporting/videos/tweets on the ground.
He got arrested last night for no reason. Interview here:
http://bcdownload.gannett.edgesuite.net/ksdk-podcasts/sharded/35121359001/2014/08/35121359001_3729956378001_ANTONIO-FRENCH-INTERVIEW.mp4
also true that a better place seems so far off. I feel like it's a truism we always repeat, that things just automatically get better, oh, it's better now than in medieval times! etc. But now that I've actually read about medieval times I'm not so sure. Some things superficially are better, of course, but like fundamentally/systemically, I'm just not so sure.
- antibiotics
- can't publicly torture people to death anymore
- Dad can't sell you as a bride to some stranger
on the flip side is all these less-easily quantifiable things, like you say...
I definitely think it's powerful to imagine a world where there is no paperwork, no insurance, no deadening bureaucratic machine that you feel takes over more and more of your life. I think there was a much, much, much more powerful experience of community and reality--I think everyone lived in these small villages, for the most part, and your lives were all bound together in a serious way. You worked in each other's fields and attended each other's childbirths and knew all of each other's business and I just think people were more like pack units. Yes, this too probably had its downsides but I definitely think it must have been much harder back then to feel alienated and isolated in the Kafkaesque contemporary biz-speak paperwork world the way people so often do now. You didn't have to worry about insurance. You didn't have a savings account because there wasn't really money yet. You didn't have to worry about what you were going to do with your parents, or yourself, when you got old, because there was a social system in place that just functioned naturally, without having to be overseen by the State, and without requiring millions of dollars etc.
And yeah, I think people were probably left alone a lot more back then. Just mind your fucking beeswax, and if you want to go hermit around in the woods you can do that. On the flip side though, I do think if you lived in a town you were probably constantly around other people who were all up in your business. But that seems acceptable to me, compared to the "not being left alone" feeling of the bureaucratic state
It's funny because I almost put "nutrition" on my list of things that are better today but then I realized that for most people it's not true! Jesus.
I mean, I want to stress that I'm thinking WAY far back, back to before capitalism. I only know really back to feudalism--I don't know what was before feudalism, I don't know if anyone really knows. Stonehenge "druid" tribes, I guess, which yeah, that sounds RAD to me. So but anyway, feudalism also sucked. It was a terrible system in many ways, but in these other ways it is so incredible to imagine a world in which value wasn't determined by money. A world in which you raised wheat in the field behind your house; harvested it, ground it up, turned it into flour, used it, ate it, period. Where it wasn't like you looked at your field and thought of it in terms of the dollar amounts it would bring in. Everything was IMMEDIATE and nothing was ABSTRACT. People valued things for their use-value, not for how much they were "worth" in money, and that is something that I think is really really hard for us to even imagine, as money-value is so ingrained in us as a way of evaluating the world, the things we do and make, etc. An economic system divorced from use value seems DEEPLY fucked to me and I think that's a thing I fantasize about a lot when I think back to the dark ages or whatever (or, obviously, to way before, to pre-agricultural revolution times, but that's too far back, no one can really bring that period alive in their imagination I think)
When people talk about how medieval times were bad, they talk about violence--witch hunts, public executions, etc. But I submit to you that we live in much more violent times, because our capacity for doing violence has increased a thousandfold. I don't think someone living in Bagdad or Ferguson would agree that their lives have less violence than a medieval peasant's life. I guess your average American is probably distanced from violence more than your average medieval person, but on the grand scale I think it's reversed. Thus I also think it's powerful to picture a world before the mechanization of war. Before nerve gas and atom bombs and tanks and machine guns. They still had terrible wars but goddamn, once wars start using machines it gets SO fucking creepy. And it's not just me! The entire Western World basically had a psychotic break after WWI.
And of course it's heartbreaking to think about the pre-industrial world---how lush and green and full of birds it was, how much wildlife was just jam-packing the endless forests, how there wasn't really cancer--not as an epidemic, anyway--because there wasn't really pollution. That's a world I think about a lot. What it would feel like to not inhabit a wheezing world on its last legs; not to look at any wild animal and have your first thought be "oh that poor, poor thing."
I can even get sad thinking about an unquestioning communal belief in an atavistic religion. It's kind of a relief to imagine just non-problematically believing that there are spirits and magical powers afoot that you can't control, and that's just why crazy shit happens, what are you gonna do. It's awesome to think of attending some rad pagan solstice party in like the year 100.
It is definitely a fool who would say "oh I wish I lived in the dark ages." Obviously if you picked me up as I am right now and plopped me down back then I would be horrified by various social relations, by the status of women, by the way everyone smelled. I would probably be dead in a week of some crazy disease my flimsy modern body couldn't withstand. They didn't have sugar yet! Coffee hadn't been discovered. No birth control! Just having 13 babies until you die horribly screaming in your bed during one of them. No thanks! I can't even imagine being actually plopped down into pre-capitalist Europe, okay, I'm not an idiot, it would be really hard on me. History is dead and it can't come back. But there are elements of that past period of our development that do make me feel sort of wistful and sad.
Plus we have skateboarding now. I'll take Modernity, thank you very much.
the place where they just strew dead bodies all around in that field and wait to see what happens to them???? I think about that place probably daily
sorry again
IT'S NOT THAT HARD.
No, it's just another example of people's desperation to side with power. Snatching at the SLIMMEST straw that allows them to feel okay about what the police did. Unreal
– Chris Hayes, live on msnbc, on Captain Johnson’s claim that the media is instigating protesters to act out.
http://iwriteaboutfeminism.tumblr.com/post/95167366153/the-idea-that-thats-whats-driving-this-strikes
https://twitter.com/iamcaroline/status/501589535671992320
Sure the cops in Ferguson are doing some horrible things, but also being a cop anywhere is one of the most thankless, noble and psychologically taxing jobs imaginable. It seriously messes people up. I am always surprised there aren't more cops losing their shit and shooting people up. I am not saying shooting people up is ok. I am just saying that being a cop divorces people from a normal civilian life and you are constantly hated for a job whose basic premise is to help people and no one seems to be addressing that. They often don't even live in the town they police which divorces them even further from their community.
None of that previous paragraph is excusing their behavior. Minorities in America are stuck in a horrible cycle that racism has created. Brown obviously did not deserve to be gunned down, and although he was not a saint it is pretty messed up to try and demonize a person who was just brutally killed while unarmed. The level of retaliation against protesters is also gross and excessive. I feel like this kind of thing has all been said a lot and everyone knows so I'm just going to leave it at that.
I just hate the good guy vs. bad guy debates that are happening. Everyone involved is a person. Not to be all "love will conquer all" but I think everyone in this situation is stuck in a pretty horrible cycle and the whole debate would be better served by empathy for both sides or to just somehow eliminate the whole concept of sides.
Here is what has been going on in Ferguson for years:
Police following trial witnesses and defendants around town and pulling them over or searching them as many as 20 times in a month
Arresting people without cause the night before trial so they could not testify
The result is what we have. It's national - http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/americans-deep-racial-divide-on-trusting-the-police/378848/
YES.
We are in a weird space where the union can demand and would probably be backed by OSHA and the like to wear vests, helmets and military protective gear, making the safer, but less so in the long term.
YT: my high school was pretty college bound, but I'm sure it is a common experience to observe high school acquaintances and say this person could either become a police person or become a criminal person.
All this analysis aside, how do we unwind it?
until there is no more private property (or, I guess, until the interests of private property aren't felt, instinctively, by vast sections of the population, to trump the interests of individuals/people), the police will tend toward fascism.
I think that adage--that this dude will either become a cop or a criminal--is really apt. Somebody who wants to wield a gun, have power, have people do what he says out of fear, to be able to act above the law...that's a particular type of personality, and I think we see with shit like Ferguson that the cops often JUST ACTUALLY ARE CRIMINALS (murdering people basically for the hell of it, e.g., but also the deep vein of corruption that haunts so many police departments--bribes, falsifying evidence, etc).
However, it's frankly even worse with cops, because a cop is that kind of personality PLUS a coward's desire to have those shitty activities sanctioned by the state. This is why so many cops are bullies. Bullies, fundamentally, are cowards. They feel powerless and afraid in their own lives so they find myriad shitty ways to exercise power over people more helpless than they are (systemically oppressed people of color, e.g.). Cop is bully writ large.
I know there are fucking awesome, deeply decent cops who truly wanted to become cops because they want to help and do good. I get that. I'm talking as a system.
(warning, they straight up shoot this guy on camera)
WHAT THE FUUUUUUUCK?
I should mention that my brother is one of those cops who got into it for good reasons and is a great dude so maybe that's why I am prone to have empathy for both sides here. He is on a hiatus right now because it was wearing on him because I think he thought the job would be more rewarding. The day before his current break he picked up a super inebriated fellow off the street and drove him to the hospital and when he was trying to help the fellow in the guy bit him. I think this kind of thing happens to cops constantly and, although I'm sure there are some fascist assholes who become cops, I think a larger chunk of asshole cops didn't start out that way and just become cold to the world because of the stresses of the job and always seeing the worst parts of humanity.