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Don't forget the power of denial and revulsion. This country has so many problems that even I tend to turn away in disgust at the uglier ones sometimes, and I'm probably in or close to the 99th percentile in political knowledge and engagement. It's the reason people in LF just post DTA instead of responding to poo poo; there's so much wrong and it's wrong so terribly that after a while the capacity to invest yourself in it gets worn down. It's much more comfortable to believe, "if they did it they must have had a reason for doing it," even if that's recognizable as basically being Stockholm Syndrome, than to acknowledge that your state and by extension you and everyone around you is party to the monstrous crime against humanity that is the modern corporate U.S.A. The prison system specifically is going to be hard to change, mostly because the average voter is an idiot who considers the effects of his vote on his fellow man a little less than he considers what he will eat after voting. Or to be more charitable, because the majority of the electorate (middle class whites) has no idea about any of the worst crimes built into this country, whether out of disgust, gullibility, or sheer lack of interest. After all, the people who've been through the prison system often can't vote.  (Even if they could the much more important wealthy people who own the prison system count more anyway.)
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Jul 26, 2010 |
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Jul 26, 2010 10:20
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Fortunately U.S. legal precedent classifies forced sterilization as a violation of constitutional rights... right? Tell me it still does? All this bullshit stems from Othering. Nobody would approve of any of this if they took the time to think about what would happen to them if they got caught up in the system, but the don't because (black) criminals are the Other. I've never had the opportunity, but I've been thinking that you could challenge the common prison rape acceptance/joking by suggesting that you and the people talking to you go rape the inmate right now. Describe in graphic detail how you would rape this person and talk like you really mean to go find them, hold them down, and anally rape them, then when the people you're talking to are horrified try to drive home the point that this is what they are laughing about.
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Jul 26, 2010 17:18
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Americans aren't out in the streets rioting because they've by and large been sold the idea that America is a just place where you succeed and fail on your own merits. Or at least people mouth that, anyway. I'm not sure how many believe that. Many Americans have come to the informed conclusion that they have no say in American politics so they just disengage, which is understandable but doesn't really help the problem.
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Jul 28, 2010 16:53
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A.S.H. posted:Are officers trained to treat any individual as a potential perp? From what I recall from the previous incarnations of the cop thread, it's a combination of warped perception from being around real criminals all the time, messed-up training and policies that are designed more to protect police from citizens than the other way around, and militarization of police forces. That and the well-known fact that authority turns a lot of people into complete assholes.
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Apr 24, 2011 04:34
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Hey now, I've met several rich old white people who think it's positively charming.
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Apr 27, 2011 06:37
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Building levees is something that people volunteer for to feel good about themselves, so having prisoners do it for low wages is something that doesn't actually bother me. Labor is needed, it's not a particularly dangerous or difficult job, and the rationale is positive rather than punitive. Of course this doesn't excuse the many other prison labor problems, but building levees I can get behind. I could see a hypothetical sane, fair and just prison system doing exactly the same thing. The air-conditioning outrage to me is the same phenomenon as the color TV outrage. It's something old people think of as a luxury, therefore people deny it to the poor and powerless to score points with conservative olds. Waiting for people to die isn't a viable strategy for change, but at least it's a comforting baseline.
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Jun 3, 2011 21:12
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Funny story about that: U.S. states don't run deficits. Most have budget-balancing provisions in their constitutions that force them to only make pro-cyclical budget decisions. This is the main way the federal government exerts power over state-level decisions, since the states are always on the verge of a budget meltdown and need Federal aid for just about everything. But it's not enough, so states have to pull short-term budget wizardry just to maintain their most basic services. Arizona, for example, recently signed a long-term lease on its capitol building over to a private wealth fund and now rents the capitol from the private company. It did this to generate money selling the lease, but that money will be gone long before the state gets the capitol building back. States all over the country take these kinds of rear end-backwards insane deals to cover budget holes because they aren't allowed to run deficits. So they make deals which are essentially borrowing money anyway, but much worse. Man explaining this country always makes it sound worse than when I started explaining.
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Jun 4, 2011 10:37
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Mister Macys posted:I've been hearing/reading that for like, ten years. This is hardly a coincidence. The American economy has been in the toilet for ten years. The housing bubble wasn't a real recovery. Massive federal deficit spending under Bush* and super-low interest rates made the economy look better than it was during those years. *Oh the irony. Our political class has such a short memory.
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Jun 5, 2011 07:41
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I think we broke the Soviet record in the early '90s. U.S.A. #1! 
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Jun 24, 2011 20:38
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Oh rationalist determinist fascist, you so crazy.  I wish he could stick around to tell us more about how a punishment-based judicial system makes sense in a deterministic world.
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Jun 28, 2011 23:28
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Mister Macys posted:CDs Just let them have MP3 players. I'm with you on everything else, but have you ever intentionally snapped a CD? Those things are sharp. They're sharp and they only hold like 20 songs and you need obsolete equipment to even play them. So I think they would probably mostly be bought because they are sharp.
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Jul 11, 2011 04:00
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