cheese it, the cops!

police power

i think that abuse is inherent in a situation of police power, and that you're not going to get away with thinking the problem is 'a few bad apples' while of course the vast majority of police officers are doing a bang-up job, as it were. i actually don't think 're-training' and so on is going to address the basic issue at all.

so you are arming one part of the population against the rest, or authorizing some to use violence and coercion that, for the others, would be criminal. the first thing to ask is what sort of person, overall, is likely to want to perform this role, and why. i am sure there are various motivations. one is surely an attraction not to the law or to the public but to the power, which is of the most concrete variety: real control of real specific people. and then you should contemplate the effect of routinely having this sort of power over a decade or whatever it may be. a certain air of arbitrary superiority is likely to develop, due to the real superiority.

the legal status of a police officer can be accurately reprersented as a series of legal impunities, as being authorized to do what would be crimes for others: binding or kidnapping people, for example, strutting around with guns and clubs on their hips, and so on. and it relies also on an informal exemption that is much more wide-ranging than that, as seen in the cases before us. these things are not addressable, i think, within the basic conceptuality that presupposes that such power is necessary and legitimate.

i do not think it is particularly plausible that constituting this sort of power is likely to reduce violence in the society as a whole. or, i wonder what evidence could actually be produced that it does? this is always asserted at the outset; it is 'common sense'. but the idea of arming one group against the others and immunizing them from the law does not, let's say, obviously entail a reduction in violence or crime however construed. and notice that in various complex ways this police power will of course mirror the power hierarchies of the society: racial, for example, and then it reinforces or reproduces or enforces those hierarchies. if you really thought about the role of policing in racial oppression through our whole history, you'd see that it is central: a necessary condition of the whole horrendously violent history, and ever more so in a situation in which mass incarceration replaced jim crow as a mode of segregation.

it is pretty amazing to watch these demonstrations unfold all over the country. in its way, a hopeful moment.

ok here's the official cheese it! the cops best video of all times.

 

hillary clinton is a completely contentless human being. her main point talking about garner: with great passion, 'we have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance, and we must put it back in balance'. surely if you have absolutely nothing to say, you should fall silent. try to live so that your death isn't redundant: concentrate first on becoming someone, then work on which someone to be.

arms race

i think that the militarization of the police indicates that we had better strap and armor up. i heard one of these defend-the-popo kind of guys saying that the message of the garner case was 'comply with the police'. i'd elaborate on that: comply. comply unto death. but if, contrary to my advice, you are not going to comply, you may find yourself needing to resist with extreme prejudice. you don't have to be a cop to choke someone out, baby.

they understand

i must say that one of the better developments in popular culture over the last few years, from the point of view of an ageing het dude, is that there is a lot more appreciation of the sexiness of women my age. admittedly, it's often kind of gauzy and problematic, as such things tend to be. anyway, not to butter y'all up, but women in their fifties and sixties are often very devastating. plus they know stuff.

 

have mercy! awww sweetie, painful sex after menopause? let's work on that.

 

 

 

peak oil

here's a very typical human mistake: thinking that reality is going to make your argument for you, and force your opponents to agree. so, as oil prices collapse, one might recall the idea of 'peak oil', in which environmentalists proved with data that a fossil fuel economy would definitely implode by 1993 or whatever it was. the reason to be suspicious even of the numbers was that the people who put this forward desperately wished for the collapse of the fossil fuel economy and were in the typical human state of extreme credulity with regard to anything that would confirm their worldview, and also totaly committed to a propaganda presentation of it to everyone else. i have to say that the whole climate change thing reeks of this. naomi klein wishes for nothing as much as the collapse of the capitalist order. so far, so good. but i think people infer facts from commitments like that, which is not so good. it's like people are trying to enlist nature or god to make their point for them and force their opponents into agreement. pretty soon you're wishing for the apocalypse. pretty soon you're providing data proving it nigh. usually you don't live long enough to really be forced to withdraw your claims, so you just sort of peter out as reality refuses to take the shape of your disastrous wishes.

It's not that I haven't had anything I could write about

It's not that nothing happened; it's just that everything that happened pissed me off more. However, I saw an article today in Foreign Affairs that as Kant said of David Hume, awakened me from my doctrinal slumbers. Actually, it just pissed me off some more, but...

Here's the article posted over at Veterans Today. Topic is about weasels, varmints and government staffers. 

Ever listen to one of these dweebs as they talk about stuff that they have no experience with but took a seminar from someone who had no experience with it either but had talked to someone about it, so...really made me think of this one...

 

i don't know what to say about the failure to indict in the nyc garner case except that it is incomprehensible. i do want to remark from the anarchist perspective that exemption from the law is of the very essence of police power.

unconscious

let me try to diagnose 'unconscious racism', which has reached an amazing hallucinatory pitch of intensity at which the whole society is structured on racist lines (residential, educational, political, income, incarceration rates, unemployment, etc), but no actual person is a racist. here's how that happened. one aspect of the civil rights movement - which continues to be central - is speech control. the word 'nigger' for example, is an emblem of racism, but then people made the faulty inference that if you eliminated the word, you would have ameliorated the injustice. more widely, people have been very confused about the relation of words to reality, and have really seemed to think that if you forced people to use the right words, you would have substantially addressed the problem. words are powerful, after all, though sometimes that seems hard to believe when everyone is yapping slop to no effect for decades on end.

now, combine this with the fact that the culture more or less came to a consensus that racism is evil. at this point white folk p faces a syllogism: 'racists are evil; i am a racist; therefore i am evil'.  there are various ways for p to deal with this personal crisis. one would be to spend long years reflecting on and dismantling a wide-ranging structure of racial attitudes. the other would be to leave all the attitudes intact and just deny that he is a racist. or run the thing backwards: 'racists are bad people; i am a good person; therefore i am not a racist'. you spend all day muttering to yourself 'i am a good person' 'i am a good person' 'i am not a bad person'. that is what the worst people have where other people have a conscience; they have a voice that says 'i am a good person'; and they need that voice; it gets them through whatever bad things they want to do or believe.

maybe you don't know this, but when white people talk to other white people they very often do this: 'i am not a racist, but...' 'i don't have a racist bone in my body, but...' i take such locutions as demonstrating the combined self-delusion and racism of the people who utter them. at any rate, the obsession with words in the various liberation movements hints that to be a racist is to have certain epithets or stereotypical characterizations run through your head. so, to not be a racist, all you have to do is censor your internal monologue. once you have, your internal monologue features paraphrases of the censored material rather that material itself, and so you spend the rest of your life congratulating yourself on your substantial accomplishment and for being such a very good person. also you get to unconsciously clean up on your own advantages, and to focus on your great deservingness.

it's unconscious alright, and it's unconscious because of each person's extremely concerted failure to introspect, each person's program of self-esteem enhancement. this is a safari into the dark heart of whiteness, or the white heart of darkness, if you prefer.

if ever there was a demonstration that there is more to the world than words, this would be it. (if you need such a demonstration, however, that's just sad.) anyway, it's all euphemisms, self-delusion, and an intractable situation on the ground. then people, every time out, wish desperately for a 'free-wheeling' or 'frank' 'dialogue'. this is after decades of imposing overwhelming social sanctions on the frank expression of racial attitudes. it's because of those sanctions that people are desperate for the dialogue, and it's because of those sanctions that the dialogue is impossible. and it's partly because of those sanctions that white liberals live in a stupor of self-congratulation, and partly because of them that you can have an obviously racist society in which no one believes of themselves that they are racist. also, at that point, there is very little hope for change, because it is impossible even to describe the situation honestly.