once was goth, but now am found
View posts on govt., its parasitism, legal quandries and the occasional good that it does.
I’d meant to post this closer to the insurrection-anniversary, but here goes (starting with a haiku from 2021)…
True Traitriots
january sixth
hoisting traitor flags, boasting
patriotism
I find it fascinating that certain “law & order” loving Americans seem obsessed with thwarting or evading our legal frameworks.
Continue reading “Crimicops & Traitriots”
In 2020, it’s become pretty clear to many people that police departments across the country, as they’ve been operating for the past 30+ years, have significant problems and these problems cannot simply be attributed to “a few bad apples.” The problems we have are endemic and systemic, including racist policies regarding “The War on Drugs” enforcement (& to be fair, the problems extend through all levels of criminal justice, not just police).
I’ve been racking my brains for how to approach police reform in a way that is meaningful without resorting to “Defund” or “Abolish” the police ideas, which I think are politically infeasible (too little public support) and, moreover, would be pointless to raise to police leadership.
The police are, to some extent, agents of chaos (see my last post), with common use of excessive: force, arrests, stops, seizures, escalation of conflict; most often focused on racial minorities & vulnerable populations. This is true despite the prevalence of well-meaning individuals (aka “good people”) within the police force.
How to transform the police into superheroes for good (in the immediate future)? Here’s my outline (and prototype of suggestions that could be shared with city/state and police leadership):
When I hear the catchphrase, “Law and Order,” I can’t help but think of the news stories of 2020, including:
Occasionally, I run across a news article or post, crediting our current leader Lump with “disintegration of trust” or otherwise creating the conditions for the corruption of our federal government. These annoy me because, unfortunately, cronyism, corruption, deception have been baked into our democratic government over the course of many decades.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the founding fathers who wrote the constitution and neglected to provide any real accountability for elected officials. Yes, yes, we have a “system of checks & balances” but one that has been easily corrupted. Two-branches of government are comprised entirely of elected officials and the third branch is appointed by one and approved by the other, so it might as well be elected. Perhaps the founders, being mostly of rational and earnest minds couldn’t conceive of politicized appointments to the judicial branch, but that’s nearly as short-sighted as their lack of consideration for non-whites, non-men and non-landowners.
I can’t unravel how we got to, as a society, a place where specious statements are the norm (I suspect it has a lot to do with the internet, but not entirely, as newspapers and textbooks included some counter-factual stories well before the start of the 21st century and dawn of the modern internet). However, I can easily explain how politicians came to speak speciously with regularity. It’s because there’s little-to-no consequence for doing so.
Continue reading “He didn’t start the (dumpster) fire”I haven’t posted in a long while, in strong part because I’ve been angry / frustrated / distressed about the current result of decades of government-distrust-mongering and neoliberalist capitalism. Result being that our government is dysfunctional, non-representative and financial disparities are wider than ever. Which has led to widespread disenfranchisement and higher susceptibility to manipulations and lies.
Capitalism, at its root = Competitive Greed
If we could strip away the glamour of that C-word, and an outsider were to consider the concept of “competitive greed” as a baseline for an economic system or government, they would not expect it to result in social good nor any sort of balance; rather, it would result in few winners and many losers in the “game.”
Continue reading “All the rage: capitalism”One thing social traditionalists are brilliant at is re-branding their “anti” positions with positive or neutral terms, such as Pro-Life (vs. Anti-Abortion/Anti-Sex), and now “alt-right.” Those of us who reject their ideology can also reject their terminology.
To my recollection, “alternative” as a category-defining adjective became widely popular in the early 1990s as a description for a modern variation on rock music, “alternative rock” (or “alternative” or “alt-rock”), then later a similar modern variation on country music, “alt-country.” With the “alt-right,” the so-called “alternative” is an ideology of extreme bigotry, seeking to mainstream a class-by-race/sex/ethnicity system, which is their mythologized* version of the American past, where any White Heterosexual, Non-Jewish Man is born to social & economic domination.
For music styles, “alternative” or “alt-” is a neutral indicator of a different flavor in a classic genre. For the political extreme right, “alt-” is an attempt to imply a modern and neutral variation, but this variation is anything but neutral. Continue reading “Reclaiming the Conversation: “Alt-right” = Bigot-right”
I remember asking my astrophysicist uncle what he thought about “Global Warming” (the old name for “Climate Change”) somewhere around 1990; he replied, “It’s an interesting theory.” I think that’s kind of where a lot of [non-ecologist] scientists were at the time.
Even though “Climate Change” as caused or exacerbated by human activity seems to have gained something of a scientific consensus, I think it is ultimately a catchy, but virtually useless phrase. Yes, of course the climate changes over time – this has been happening since before humans walked the earth and is, to some degree, a natural occurrence. Ultimately, this is what weakens the environmentalist stance vis-à-vis this oblique terminology.
Actual climate change is but a part of the problem, or more accurately, a consequence arising from the problems of human technology and terra-forming. I say trash (& do not recycle) the phrase, “Climate Change,” – let’s talk about the real issue, which is Destruction of Natural Resources or Non-sustainability.
Continue reading “Reclaiming the Conversation: “Climate Change””
Probably the most deeply ingrained myth in the USA is the idea that anyone can gain anything, that if you work hard enough (& think positive), you can achieve any success. If you flip the same pieces around, the same belief system says that people get what they deserve.
I can’t imagine a more hostile piece of elitist malarkey. Sadly, even people who are not successful believe this, as it gives them hope that they can succeed far beyond what their circumstances would seem to allow.
The fact is that circumstances matter. Not everyone is given equal opportunity in our highly skewed educational system, where some public schools are much better funded (with correspondingly better outcomes) than others and where some schools have inaccurate “facts” or religious tenets in their course curriculum. Continue reading “The Affliction of American Optimism”
I can understand how an individual might be anti-abortion. I don’t agree, but I get it – life is precious and all lives (even potential lives in the form of fertilized eggs) should be nurtured and allowed to flourish. However, the so-called “Pro-Life” Movement is a complete fraud.
The concept of neutrality (or moderation) seems to embody a sort of lofty wisdom in our culture, an ability to stay “above” the fighting. However, in reality, maintaining a strict neutrality is more often a sign of severe apathy, unwillingness to engage or fear of confrontation.
I’m not the kind of person who thinks in binary, so I won’t say that every dispute requires that one pick a side, but I will say that in the case of heated debate on an issue or set of issues, the underlying opposing viewpoints are often complex and merit some consideration. Moreover, the two (or more) sides are frequently uneven (i.e., one side often has a much stronger case), so if the neutralists could weigh the issues and involve themselves, they might help solve the issue in the most favorable way.
About 10 years ago, I was living with 2 roommates who were “random” in the sense that we’d met online and interviewed in person. While they weren’t friends, we were all civil and got along fine, I thought. Then after about 1 year, there was a conflict. I’d brought up some concerns regarding our landlord and was trying to bolster support for asking the landlord to take care of some things. After a few rounds of discussion (in person and on email), one of my roommates began cursing me out on the emails and became a complete jerk in person, slamming doors and refusing to talk to me. I did not respond in kind, rather I tried to re-open dialog calmly, to no avail. Baffled and upset, I asked the other roommate (who had witnessed this behavior) for help and she said that she didn’t want to get involved, that we were both being “extreme.” Continue reading “Neutrality (it’s not as neutral as you think)”