Poetic Justice posted:

I've read all the other forums, like Pet Island and Coupons and sosmart and fyad and byob, and I have to say, GBS tops them all, imo. You guys are the most funny entertaining group of forum goers in the last 10 years. I'm glad that the mods and admins and Ik's decided to let you all loose, because you are the best. Never change thanks

GrrrlSweatshirt posted:

gbs is great right now and i really like to post here and read it. im glad i can post here, in a good forum.

Agrajag posted:

gay

Poetic Justice posted:

gbs is the best forum for non clique/cult forum posting left on SA

Mumpy Puffinz posted:

its he best forum for being drunk as hell!

Poetic Justice posted:

Fart Puzzle posted:

im so happy

Wolfsheim posted:

look at this fuckin' idiot who's never been to D&D

Poetic Justice posted:

Why riot now, and not during the Civil Rights Movement?

The answer to this question is surprisingly simple: St. Louis, both city and county, are in transition. Let us examine where race riots had occured during the civil rights movements: Neighborhoods which were the most integrated had the most violent riots. In Chicago, riots occured in communities which had 60-40 majority:minority composition without power sharing in representative government. In Detroit, the riots occured in 70-30 minority:majority neighborhoods and spread to 30-70 minority:majority neighborhoods. In St. Louis, there were almost no minority-majority integrated communities during the civil rights movement.

Why? Let us examine the history and geology of St. Louis. Unlike other midwestern states, the city is limited by geography the bounds of its expansion. It grew north-south along the river, with expansion inland coming only after the mechanized revolution allowed for cheap drainage of swamps and irrigation canals to be dug. Let us have a snapshot of the city in 1947, after the return of GIs and the beginning of the baby boom:

The city's neighborhoods are aligned north-south, with a central core clearly identified by its density. From the core radiated extensive mass transit networks: southwest down Gravois, northwest up Hodiamont were the two primary streetcar arteries. In addition, several northwest-southwest and west-east heavy rail lines had emerged. Further, there was a north-south line which intersected and allowed route switching running along, roughly, the east boundary of Forest Park. Roughly, where the interstates are now, the commuter rail lines went. In addition, almost all the current freight rail infrastructure was used for interurban commuter service until the 60s and early 70s. If one were to make an animated artery map of St. Louis transit in 1947, they would see a distinct north-south flow towards the core in the morning, and an evening rush outward along these same routes. On the weekend, the core district would be considered westward of the current shell of a downtown--roughly where Fox Theatre and Moolah's are.

What was the impact of this in 1947? On the ground, mass transit use was composed of integrated ridership along a segregated system. Now, I stated that the city was southern because of how much it lacked integration. To cement that statement, take a look at neighborhood racial composition in 1947. What makes St. Louis a southern city? While northern cities would discourage working class communities from integrating through service cuts, they would not outright prohibit an individual from choosing to live in a mixed community. In St. Louis, citizen's groups would. For instance, in Chicago, several inner-ring commuter suburbs grew because of a racially mixed middle and upper class wishing to separate themselves from lower-class hooliganism. If you lived in Bronzeville and made a fortune through honest business, your ambition would be to move to Beverly Hills or Homewood. In St. Louis, white citizen's militias would firebomb, lynch, or rape any individuals who moved to a neighborhood not designated of their race. Once again, it comes back to transit services: while commuties elsewhere in the Midwest attempted to reign in the rate of service integration by codifying sundown laws, there was no need in St. Louis. If you were out of place racially, you were out of place for a specific purpose. There was no fear that you would rob a white house and then use transit to return home. How could there be? Everyone knew where the Germans lived, where the French landholders gravitated, and where the different colored populations were kept. Yes, there were slums; there were segregated slums, by racial hue, class, religion, and mother language.

St. Louis is an old city with an aristocratic French culture. It is slow to change, and only changes when the optics force it to. Why should it do so otherwise? It is the best culture in the world, the most literary, the best artistic, the greatest civil society ever known to man, and it is the responsibility of the masses to recognize the greatness of the elites so that they may share in cultural diffusion.

Individuals are resilliant: humans adapt the power structures they understand as beneficial, and work within those systems to advance their social mobility. If you were poor and darker black, you would live in the poor and dark community. You'd receive services as equal to the Swedish neighborhood acrosd the 90 foot wide boulevard and had the freedom to shop there any time. As long as you returned home to your island in this urban sea when the times called, you would live under the system in place which granted you a better chance at clearly-delineated social mobility. You had full rights and opportunity to be represented by your own community, to be policed by your own community, to feel a member in a greater community. In this sense, St. Louis was still very much a model city of the year 1900 in the year 1947.

In America, there is an ideological blindness towards history: we see it as a continual march forward of rights, of expanding the franchise, yet do not discuss how Boston Marriage was both universally legal and socially accepted in 1900, while now Americans on the whole find it much less so. Living as a young, dark-skinned black male of Bantu descent in Chicago of 1900 would allow one to perceive a greater chance at social mobility than living in Montgommery in 1947. Similarly, to be born in St. Louis as a baby boomer, one would see life in the city as providing a greater chance at mobility than living that same life in Houston, in Birmingham, in Chicago. And why not? The city had systems and treated everyone equally, as long as you followed the rules and returned home when told to. To resist this command would be unthinkable; your neighborhood would shun you, businesses would boycott you, trains and trollies--conducted by your neighbors--ignore you. Simply, you'd be driven out of Missouri and over to East St. Louis and have to pay the tolls any time you wished to visit.

This changed with the interstates. No longer did the exiles have to pay the toll to access the emerald white city; no longer did they have to use clearly known transit routes to return to their homes. The first suburban migration fron St. Louis took place along the major east-west corridor, the modern I-64/40, and was done so by white middle-class individuals looking for the same social dynamics which created the inner-ring suburbs of Chicago and Detroit. They wanted to live with members of other religions, to live with their nice English or Italian or German wife outside their designated neighborhood, to not be shunned by the landed aristocracy for their ethnic mixing. So the Swedish neighborhood experienced out-migration rapidly; so the German neighborhoods moved to Clayton; so the Irish weren't restricted to Soulard's shittiest watering holes and the archgrounds became a quarter-populated slum. So the landed aristocracy of St. Louis was faxing lowered income with equal taxation, and chose to lower rents to a level which even blacks could afford, and so that Swedish-Norweigian area became Kings Oak, became Forest Park Southeast. The city, seeing reduced tax income, cut back on services while following federal incentives to maintain a semblance of a budget. It attempted to create projects to demonstrate to the poor and middle class whites they need not flight from the other whites. Yes, white flight occured in St. Louis, from the city to the county: Unlike the rest of the nation, this white flight was from whites, as had played out in the rest of the nation between 1914 and 1941.

Often, you'll find people apt to say St. Louis is a northern city with a southern culture. The only other city in America like this is Washington, D.C.; ask a local if they mean, "Like D.C.?" Here, we find that remnant of French landowning aristocracy living in a city of German neuvo-riche: You can only compare St. Louis to the city founded by George Washington, engineered by Lafayette, that city which is the crowning jewel of the American nation. I'm here to tell you that St. Louis is not D.C., that it is not the seat of highest government for the greatest nation on earth, that while there were plans for it to be, its slaveholding cousins, its namesake compromise, forced those plans abandoned in their civil war. You screwed the pooch, heriditary aristocracy of the southern breed, and now must live with the consequences.

Enough moralizing and onto concrete examples. When the first suburbs were built, mass transit still operated within the city. As both city and county cut services, as the Federal government reimbursed states for highway spending [a subject I once drove to the Ike library to research, and upon which I hold as the reason that military integration and basic voting rights passed Congress], as the railroads invented Switchbacking to reduce their tax and operating expenses, as service rates and reliability diminshed, as the environmental laws incentivized building tear-down and parking lots for 'clean water runoff,' the city moved from a planned river hub to an unplanned commuter district. The whites integrated. Instead of asking, where are your parents from, the optics made it better to ask, where did you go to highschool.

In that question is revealed the true nature of Eastern Missouri: mass communication has made it unacceptable to discriminate against what majority culture defines as white (we certainly don't, its more important to know your heriditary lineage than 'who sent you' or 'what do you do' or 'what're you inventing today?'. So, instead of accepting those loving kikes or wops, you ask where they went to highschool and learn rapidly to associate the highschool answer with sensible differences: kids from this school smell differently than kids from that school, even if they're just a bunch of drat niggers to me. You know, I like that smell better, at least those niggers are some of the good ones. Please do excuse the crass language; its an accurate representation of the underlying sentiments I observed in St. Louis. And it has sound psychological evidence, sound anthropoligical reasoning.

You should never know how connected someone is by looking at them, which is why other cities have been able to intregrate their administrative offices and share access to elite power. In Chicago, you ask where someone's from and you learn the characters of the neighborhoods and suburbs. You don't ask where someone went to highschool. Its drat impolite to use highschool as the primary indicator of status, since it should be assumed everyone has an opportunity to attend highschool. If you associate highschool eith status, you focus on improving the reputation of your answer. Same for neighborhood, except you can improve neighborhoods with community organizing. You can't improve the reputation of your highschool with community organizing, as the reputation of your highschool is directly tied to its associated reputations.

So you find that highschool becane the heriditary question asked in St. Louis by the boomers, as its just too impolite to ask their parents' question. And in response, you find that the city implemented a desegregated highschool policy during the civil rights movement. As its neighborhoods were emptied, and their shells segregated by perceived barriers that henceforce had not existed, St. Louis became a city of two races: white and black. And as the civil rights movement occured, this newfound freedom of mobility prevented the riots that had hitherfore been seen elsewhere. Riots, as historical events, are the best off-hand proxy for level of racial and economic integration within communities. Riots occur when the rate of physical integration and social integration are unequal. Riots occur when you're the best city in America, when everyone just needs to listen and obey the system and go home when we tell them to because that's how our parents solved these problems and prevented the city from burning down in the 60s and 70s. No, St. Louis has had a much slower burn, the current burn of Detroit: one house at a time, one empty block followed by another, rather than collective action resulting in mass burns.

Another example of concrete policy in St. Louis that is an attempt to cement that "Just return home when we tell you to and everything will be ok" attitude: All the drat roadblocks. You built grid system for a reason--mobility and inter-connection. You built barriers to those grids for another reason--to prevent mobility at the level of the block. While other cities only segregated their working-class neighborhoods with their first highways, St. Louis segregated every community and then went on to segregate every block. Take, for instance, Skinker-DeBalivier and the West End. Both were economic hub communities until the 70s and the outright illegality of purely racial segregation. You can segregate by proxy, never directly. But these neighborhoods? As cars became proxy for individuals, you had to wall off your community from outsiders by creating narrow gateways and restricting access to those who know the locality. Sure, they're sold as measures to 'prevent crime like burglaries,' only because its improper to state that they were erected to prevent access by potential criminals, since this demands that one know who potential criminals are rather than what potential crimes could be. And ask yourself, who do these neighborhoods see as potential criminals? I know the Ferguson PD has its direct answer, for it is the job of the police to know the who, what, where, when, and why of crimes in that order.

I mean, christ, I'd go dancing in NoCo with my African friends and, although they are in the global 1%, although they would come to the meeting in a fitted and custom-tailored suit with the same watch that the Schlaffly or Busch daughters wore, they'd be treated by their race as the primary determinant of their wealth status until a local would associate me with them. And this attitude extended to business meetings and finance, of all places, where one would hope fiscal greed to take paramount importance over heriditary attributes.

So, what can the city do to prevent future riots? Do you want unrealistic policy suggestions or suggestions of what is possible, politically acceptable, and profitable? The first is easy and has obvious answers, and will never happen. The second may be cynical, borderline illegal, certainly immoral, and would still be better than the status quo.

Calvin Johnson Jr. posted:

real talk

Poetic Justice posted:

faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaart

Mumpy Puffinz posted:

please don't ever quote this or any big thing again.
Thanks!

Poetic Justice posted:

Why riot now, and not during the Civil Rights Movement?

The answer to this question is surprisingly simple: St. Louis, both city and county, are in transition. Let us examine where race riots had occured during the civil rights movements: Neighborhoods which were the most integrated had the most violent riots. In Chicago, riots occured in communities which had 60-40 majority:minority composition without power sharing in representative government. In Detroit, the riots occured in 70-30 minority:majority neighborhoods and spread to 30-70 minority:majority neighborhoods. In St. Louis, there were almost no minority-majority integrated communities during the civil rights movement.

Why? Let us examine the history and geology of St. Louis. Unlike other midwestern states, the city is limited by geography the bounds of its expansion. It grew north-south along the river, with expansion inland coming only after the mechanized revolution allowed for cheap drainage of swamps and irrigation canals to be dug. Let us have a snapshot of the city in 1947, after the return of GIs and the beginning of the baby boom:

The city's neighborhoods are aligned north-south, with a central core clearly identified by its density. From the core radiated extensive mass transit networks: southwest down Gravois, northwest up Hodiamont were the two primary streetcar arteries. In addition, several northwest-southwest and west-east heavy rail lines had emerged. Further, there was a north-south line which intersected and allowed route switching running along, roughly, the east boundary of Forest Park. Roughly, where the interstates are now, the commuter rail lines went. In addition, almost all the current freight rail infrastructure was used for interurban commuter service until the 60s and early 70s. If one were to make an animated artery map of St. Louis transit in 1947, they would see a distinct north-south flow towards the core in the morning, and an evening rush outward along these same routes. On the weekend, the core district would be considered westward of the current shell of a downtown--roughly where Fox Theatre and Moolah's are.

What was the impact of this in 1947? On the ground, mass transit use was composed of integrated ridership along a segregated system. Now, I stated that the city was southern because of how much it lacked integration. To cement that statement, take a look at neighborhood racial composition in 1947. What makes St. Louis a southern city? While northern cities would discourage working class communities from integrating through service cuts, they would not outright prohibit an individual from choosing to live in a mixed community. In St. Louis, citizen's groups would. For instance, in Chicago, several inner-ring commuter suburbs grew because of a racially mixed middle and upper class wishing to separate themselves from lower-class hooliganism. If you lived in Bronzeville and made a fortune through honest business, your ambition would be to move to Beverly Hills or Homewood. In St. Louis, white citizen's militias would firebomb, lynch, or rape any individuals who moved to a neighborhood not designated of their race. Once again, it comes back to transit services: while commuties elsewhere in the Midwest attempted to reign in the rate of service integration by codifying sundown laws, there was no need in St. Louis. If you were out of place racially, you were out of place for a specific purpose. There was no fear that you would rob a white house and then use transit to return home. How could there be? Everyone knew where the Germans lived, where the French landholders gravitated, and where the different colored populations were kept. Yes, there were slums; there were segregated slums, by racial hue, class, religion, and mother language.

St. Louis is an old city with an aristocratic French culture. It is slow to change, and only changes when the optics force it to. Why should it do so otherwise? It is the best culture in the world, the most literary, the best artistic, the greatest civil society ever known to man, and it is the responsibility of the masses to recognize the greatness of the elites so that they may share in cultural diffusion.

Individuals are resilliant: humans adapt the power structures they understand as beneficial, and work within those systems to advance their social mobility. If you were poor and darker black, you would live in the poor and dark community. You'd receive services as equal to the Swedish neighborhood acrosd the 90 foot wide boulevard and had the freedom to shop there any time. As long as you returned home to your island in this urban sea when the times called, you would live under the system in place which granted you a better chance at clearly-delineated social mobility. You had full rights and opportunity to be represented by your own community, to be policed by your own community, to feel a member in a greater community. In this sense, St. Louis was still very much a model city of the year 1900 in the year 1947.

In America, there is an ideological blindness towards history: we see it as a continual march forward of rights, of expanding the franchise, yet do not discuss how Boston Marriage was both universally legal and socially accepted in 1900, while now Americans on the whole find it much less so. Living as a young, dark-skinned black male of Bantu descent in Chicago of 1900 would allow one to perceive a greater chance at social mobility than living in Montgommery in 1947. Similarly, to be born in St. Louis as a baby boomer, one would see life in the city as providing a greater chance at mobility than living that same life in Houston, in Birmingham, in Chicago. And why not? The city had systems and treated everyone equally, as long as you followed the rules and returned home when told to. To resist this command would be unthinkable; your neighborhood would shun you, businesses would boycott you, trains and trollies--conducted by your neighbors--ignore you. Simply, you'd be driven out of Missouri and over to East St. Louis and have to pay the tolls any time you wished to visit.

This changed with the interstates. No longer did the exiles have to pay the toll to access the emerald white city; no longer did they have to use clearly known transit routes to return to their homes. The first suburban migration fron St. Louis took place along the major east-west corridor, the modern I-64/40, and was done so by white middle-class individuals looking for the same social dynamics which created the inner-ring suburbs of Chicago and Detroit. They wanted to live with members of other religions, to live with their nice English or Italian or German wife outside their designated neighborhood, to not be shunned by the landed aristocracy for their ethnic mixing. So the Swedish neighborhood experienced out-migration rapidly; so the German neighborhoods moved to Clayton; so the Irish weren't restricted to Soulard's shittiest watering holes and the archgrounds became a quarter-populated slum. So the landed aristocracy of St. Louis was faxing lowered income with equal taxation, and chose to lower rents to a level which even blacks could afford, and so that Swedish-Norweigian area became Kings Oak, became Forest Park Southeast. The city, seeing reduced tax income, cut back on services while following federal incentives to maintain a semblance of a budget. It attempted to create projects to demonstrate to the poor and middle class whites they need not flight from the other whites. Yes, white flight occured in St. Louis, from the city to the county: Unlike the rest of the nation, this white flight was from whites, as had played out in the rest of the nation between 1914 and 1941.

Often, you'll find people apt to say St. Louis is a northern city with a southern culture. The only other city in America like this is Washington, D.C.; ask a local if they mean, "Like D.C.?" Here, we find that remnant of French landowning aristocracy living in a city of German neuvo-riche: You can only compare St. Louis to the city founded by George Washington, engineered by Lafayette, that city which is the crowning jewel of the American nation. I'm here to tell you that St. Louis is not D.C., that it is not the seat of highest government for the greatest nation on earth, that while there were plans for it to be, its slaveholding cousins, its namesake compromise, forced those plans abandoned in their civil war. You screwed the pooch, heriditary aristocracy of the southern breed, and now must live with the consequences.

Enough moralizing and onto concrete examples. When the first suburbs were built, mass transit still operated within the city. As both city and county cut services, as the Federal government reimbursed states for highway spending [a subject I once drove to the Ike library to research, and upon which I hold as the reason that military integration and basic voting rights passed Congress], as the railroads invented Switchbacking to reduce their tax and operating expenses, as service rates and reliability diminshed, as the environmental laws incentivized building tear-down and parking lots for 'clean water runoff,' the city moved from a planned river hub to an unplanned commuter district. The whites integrated. Instead of asking, where are your parents from, the optics made it better to ask, where did you go to highschool.

In that question is revealed the true nature of Eastern Missouri: mass communication has made it unacceptable to discriminate against what majority culture defines as white (we certainly don't, its more important to know your heriditary lineage than 'who sent you' or 'what do you do' or 'what're you inventing today?'. So, instead of accepting those loving kikes or wops, you ask where they went to highschool and learn rapidly to associate the highschool answer with sensible differences: kids from this school smell differently than kids from that school, even if they're just a bunch of drat niggers to me. You know, I like that smell better, at least those niggers are some of the good ones. Please do excuse the crass language; its an accurate representation of the underlying sentiments I observed in St. Louis. And it has sound psychological evidence, sound anthropoligical reasoning.

You should never know how connected someone is by looking at them, which is why other cities have been able to intregrate their administrative offices and share access to elite power. In Chicago, you ask where someone's from and you learn the characters of the neighborhoods and suburbs. You don't ask where someone went to highschool. Its drat impolite to use highschool as the primary indicator of status, since it should be assumed everyone has an opportunity to attend highschool. If you associate highschool eith status, you focus on improving the reputation of your answer. Same for neighborhood, except you can improve neighborhoods with community organizing. You can't improve the reputation of your highschool with community organizing, as the reputation of your highschool is directly tied to its associated reputations.

So you find that highschool becane the heriditary question asked in St. Louis by the boomers, as its just too impolite to ask their parents' question. And in response, you find that the city implemented a desegregated highschool policy during the civil rights movement. As its neighborhoods were emptied, and their shells segregated by perceived barriers that henceforce had not existed, St. Louis became a city of two races: white and black. And as the civil rights movement occured, this newfound freedom of mobility prevented the riots that had hitherfore been seen elsewhere. Riots, as historical events, are the best off-hand proxy for level of racial and economic integration within communities. Riots occur when the rate of physical integration and social integration are unequal. Riots occur when you're the best city in America, when everyone just needs to listen and obey the system and go home when we tell them to because that's how our parents solved these problems and prevented the city from burning down in the 60s and 70s. No, St. Louis has had a much slower burn, the current burn of Detroit: one house at a time, one empty block followed by another, rather than collective action resulting in mass burns.

Another example of concrete policy in St. Louis that is an attempt to cement that "Just return home when we tell you to and everything will be ok" attitude: All the drat roadblocks. You built grid system for a reason--mobility and inter-connection. You built barriers to those grids for another reason--to prevent mobility at the level of the block. While other cities only segregated their working-class neighborhoods with their first highways, St. Louis segregated every community and then went on to segregate every block. Take, for instance, Skinker-DeBalivier and the West End. Both were economic hub communities until the 70s and the outright illegality of purely racial segregation. You can segregate by proxy, never directly. But these neighborhoods? As cars became proxy for individuals, you had to wall off your community from outsiders by creating narrow gateways and restricting access to those who know the locality. Sure, they're sold as measures to 'prevent crime like burglaries,' only because its improper to state that they were erected to prevent access by potential criminals, since this demands that one know who potential criminals are rather than what potential crimes could be. And ask yourself, who do these neighborhoods see as potential criminals? I know the Ferguson PD has its direct answer, for it is the job of the police to know the who, what, where, when, and why of crimes in that order.

I mean, christ, I'd go dancing in NoCo with my African friends and, although they are in the global 1%, although they would come to the meeting in a fitted and custom-tailored suit with the same watch that the Schlaffly or Busch daughters wore, they'd be treated by their race as the primary determinant of their wealth status until a local would associate me with them. And this attitude extended to business meetings and finance, of all places, where one would hope fiscal greed to take paramount importance over heriditary attributes.

So, what can the city do to prevent future riots? Do you want unrealistic policy suggestions or suggestions of what is possible, politically acceptable, and profitable? The first is easy and has obvious answers, and will never happen. The second may be cynical, borderline illegal, certainly immoral, and would still be better than the status quo.

Wolfsheim posted:

didn't read dis

Poetic Justice posted:

Why riot now, and not during the Civil Rights Movement?

The answer to this question is surprisingly simple: St. Louis, both city and county, are in transition. Let us examine where race riots had occured during the civil rights movements: Neighborhoods which were the most integrated had the most violent riots. In Chicago, riots occured in communities which had 60-40 majority:minority composition without power sharing in representative government. In Detroit, the riots occured in 70-30 minority:majority neighborhoods and spread to 30-70 minority:majority neighborhoods. In St. Louis, there were almost no minority-majority integrated communities during the civil rights movement.

Why? Let us examine the history and geology of St. Louis. Unlike other midwestern states, the city is limited by geography the bounds of its expansion. It grew north-south along the river, with expansion inland coming only after the mechanized revolution allowed for cheap drainage of swamps and irrigation canals to be dug. Let us have a snapshot of the city in 1947, after the return of GIs and the beginning of the baby boom:

The city's neighborhoods are aligned north-south, with a central core clearly identified by its density. From the core radiated extensive mass transit networks: southwest down Gravois, northwest up Hodiamont were the two primary streetcar arteries. In addition, several northwest-southwest and west-east heavy rail lines had emerged. Further, there was a north-south line which intersected and allowed route switching running along, roughly, the east boundary of Forest Park. Roughly, where the interstates are now, the commuter rail lines went. In addition, almost all the current freight rail infrastructure was used for interurban commuter service until the 60s and early 70s. If one were to make an animated artery map of St. Louis transit in 1947, they would see a distinct north-south flow towards the core in the morning, and an evening rush outward along these same routes. On the weekend, the core district would be considered westward of the current shell of a downtown--roughly where Fox Theatre and Moolah's are.

What was the impact of this in 1947? On the ground, mass transit use was composed of integrated ridership along a segregated system. Now, I stated that the city was southern because of how much it lacked integration. To cement that statement, take a look at neighborhood racial composition in 1947. What makes St. Louis a southern city? While northern cities would discourage working class communities from integrating through service cuts, they would not outright prohibit an individual from choosing to live in a mixed community. In St. Louis, citizen's groups would. For instance, in Chicago, several inner-ring commuter suburbs grew because of a racially mixed middle and upper class wishing to separate themselves from lower-class hooliganism. If you lived in Bronzeville and made a fortune through honest business, your ambition would be to move to Beverly Hills or Homewood. In St. Louis, white citizen's militias would firebomb, lynch, or rape any individuals who moved to a neighborhood not designated of their race. Once again, it comes back to transit services: while commuties elsewhere in the Midwest attempted to reign in the rate of service integration by codifying sundown laws, there was no need in St. Louis. If you were out of place racially, you were out of place for a specific purpose. There was no fear that you would rob a white house and then use transit to return home. How could there be? Everyone knew where the Germans lived, where the French landholders gravitated, and where the different colored populations were kept. Yes, there were slums; there were segregated slums, by racial hue, class, religion, and mother language.

St. Louis is an old city with an aristocratic French culture. It is slow to change, and only changes when the optics force it to. Why should it do so otherwise? It is the best culture in the world, the most literary, the best artistic, the greatest civil society ever known to man, and it is the responsibility of the masses to recognize the greatness of the elites so that they may share in cultural diffusion.

Individuals are resilliant: humans adapt the power structures they understand as beneficial, and work within those systems to advance their social mobility. If you were poor and darker black, you would live in the poor and dark community. You'd receive services as equal to the Swedish neighborhood acrosd the 90 foot wide boulevard and had the freedom to shop there any time. As long as you returned home to your island in this urban sea when the times called, you would live under the system in place which granted you a better chance at clearly-delineated social mobility. You had full rights and opportunity to be represented by your own community, to be policed by your own community, to feel a member in a greater community. In this sense, St. Louis was still very much a model city of the year 1900 in the year 1947.

In America, there is an ideological blindness towards history: we see it as a continual march forward of rights, of expanding the franchise, yet do not discuss how Boston Marriage was both universally legal and socially accepted in 1900, while now Americans on the whole find it much less so. Living as a young, dark-skinned black male of Bantu descent in Chicago of 1900 would allow one to perceive a greater chance at social mobility than living in Montgommery in 1947. Similarly, to be born in St. Louis as a baby boomer, one would see life in the city as providing a greater chance at mobility than living that same life in Houston, in Birmingham, in Chicago. And why not? The city had systems and treated everyone equally, as long as you followed the rules and returned home when told to. To resist this command would be unthinkable; your neighborhood would shun you, businesses would boycott you, trains and trollies--conducted by your neighbors--ignore you. Simply, you'd be driven out of Missouri and over to East St. Louis and have to pay the tolls any time you wished to visit.

This changed with the interstates. No longer did the exiles have to pay the toll to access the emerald white city; no longer did they have to use clearly known transit routes to return to their homes. The first suburban migration fron St. Louis took place along the major east-west corridor, the modern I-64/40, and was done so by white middle-class individuals looking for the same social dynamics which created the inner-ring suburbs of Chicago and Detroit. They wanted to live with members of other religions, to live with their nice English or Italian or German wife outside their designated neighborhood, to not be shunned by the landed aristocracy for their ethnic mixing. So the Swedish neighborhood experienced out-migration rapidly; so the German neighborhoods moved to Clayton; so the Irish weren't restricted to Soulard's shittiest watering holes and the archgrounds became a quarter-populated slum. So the landed aristocracy of St. Louis was faxing lowered income with equal taxation, and chose to lower rents to a level which even blacks could afford, and so that Swedish-Norweigian area became Kings Oak, became Forest Park Southeast. The city, seeing reduced tax income, cut back on services while following federal incentives to maintain a semblance of a budget. It attempted to create projects to demonstrate to the poor and middle class whites they need not flight from the other whites. Yes, white flight occured in St. Louis, from the city to the county: Unlike the rest of the nation, this white flight was from whites, as had played out in the rest of the nation between 1914 and 1941.

Often, you'll find people apt to say St. Louis is a northern city with a southern culture. The only other city in America like this is Washington, D.C.; ask a local if they mean, "Like D.C.?" Here, we find that remnant of French landowning aristocracy living in a city of German neuvo-riche: You can only compare St. Louis to the city founded by George Washington, engineered by Lafayette, that city which is the crowning jewel of the American nation. I'm here to tell you that St. Louis is not D.C., that it is not the seat of highest government for the greatest nation on earth, that while there were plans for it to be, its slaveholding cousins, its namesake compromise, forced those plans abandoned in their civil war. You screwed the pooch, heriditary aristocracy of the southern breed, and now must live with the consequences.

Enough moralizing and onto concrete examples. When the first suburbs were built, mass transit still operated within the city. As both city and county cut services, as the Federal government reimbursed states for highway spending [a subject I once drove to the Ike library to research, and upon which I hold as the reason that military integration and basic voting rights passed Congress], as the railroads invented Switchbacking to reduce their tax and operating expenses, as service rates and reliability diminshed, as the environmental laws incentivized building tear-down and parking lots for 'clean water runoff,' the city moved from a planned river hub to an unplanned commuter district. The whites integrated. Instead of asking, where are your parents from, the optics made it better to ask, where did you go to highschool.

In that question is revealed the true nature of Eastern Missouri: mass communication has made it unacceptable to discriminate against what majority culture defines as white (we certainly don't, its more important to know your heriditary lineage than 'who sent you' or 'what do you do' or 'what're you inventing today?'. So, instead of accepting those loving kikes or wops, you ask where they went to highschool and learn rapidly to associate the highschool answer with sensible differences: kids from this school smell differently than kids from that school, even if they're just a bunch of drat niggers to me. You know, I like that smell better, at least those niggers are some of the good ones. Please do excuse the crass language; its an accurate representation of the underlying sentiments I observed in St. Louis. And it has sound psychological evidence, sound anthropoligical reasoning.

You should never know how connected someone is by looking at them, which is why other cities have been able to intregrate their administrative offices and share access to elite power. In Chicago, you ask where someone's from and you learn the characters of the neighborhoods and suburbs. You don't ask where someone went to highschool. Its drat impolite to use highschool as the primary indicator of status, since it should be assumed everyone has an opportunity to attend highschool. If you associate highschool eith status, you focus on improving the reputation of your answer. Same for neighborhood, except you can improve neighborhoods with community organizing. You can't improve the reputation of your highschool with community organizing, as the reputation of your highschool is directly tied to its associated reputations.

So you find that highschool becane the heriditary question asked in St. Louis by the boomers, as its just too impolite to ask their parents' question. And in response, you find that the city implemented a desegregated highschool policy during the civil rights movement. As its neighborhoods were emptied, and their shells segregated by perceived barriers that henceforce had not existed, St. Louis became a city of two races: white and black. And as the civil rights movement occured, this newfound freedom of mobility prevented the riots that had hitherfore been seen elsewhere. Riots, as historical events, are the best off-hand proxy for level of racial and economic integration within communities. Riots occur when the rate of physical integration and social integration are unequal. Riots occur when you're the best city in America, when everyone just needs to listen and obey the system and go home when we tell them to because that's how our parents solved these problems and prevented the city from burning down in the 60s and 70s. No, St. Louis has had a much slower burn, the current burn of Detroit: one house at a time, one empty block followed by another, rather than collective action resulting in mass burns.

Another example of concrete policy in St. Louis that is an attempt to cement that "Just return home when we tell you to and everything will be ok" attitude: All the drat roadblocks. You built grid system for a reason--mobility and inter-connection. You built barriers to those grids for another reason--to prevent mobility at the level of the block. While other cities only segregated their working-class neighborhoods with their first highways, St. Louis segregated every community and then went on to segregate every block. Take, for instance, Skinker-DeBalivier and the West End. Both were economic hub communities until the 70s and the outright illegality of purely racial segregation. You can segregate by proxy, never directly. But these neighborhoods? As cars became proxy for individuals, you had to wall off your community from outsiders by creating narrow gateways and restricting access to those who know the locality. Sure, they're sold as measures to 'prevent crime like burglaries,' only because its improper to state that they were erected to prevent access by potential criminals, since this demands that one know who potential criminals are rather than what potential crimes could be. And ask yourself, who do these neighborhoods see as potential criminals? I know the Ferguson PD has its direct answer, for it is the job of the police to know the who, what, where, when, and why of crimes in that order.

I mean, christ, I'd go dancing in NoCo with my African friends and, although they are in the global 1%, although they would come to the meeting in a fitted and custom-tailored suit with the same watch that the Schlaffly or Busch daughters wore, they'd be treated by their race as the primary determinant of their wealth status until a local would associate me with them. And this attitude extended to business meetings and finance, of all places, where one would hope fiscal greed to take paramount importance over heriditary attributes.

So, what can the city do to prevent future riots? Do you want unrealistic policy suggestions or suggestions of what is possible, politically acceptable, and profitable? The first is easy and has obvious answers, and will never happen. The second may be cynical, borderline illegal, certainly immoral, and would still be better than the status quo.

Alas Boobylon posted:

is dnd supposed to be smarter than gbs cause every dnd thread seems to be one crinkling aluminum foil away from assbergers apoplexia

Poetic Justice posted:

Why riot now, and not during the Civil Rights Movement?

The answer to this question is surprisingly simple: St. Louis, both city and county, are in transition. Let us examine where race riots had occured during the civil rights movements: Neighborhoods which were the most integrated had the most violent riots. In Chicago, riots occured in communities which had 60-40 majority:minority composition without power sharing in representative government. In Detroit, the riots occured in 70-30 minority:majority neighborhoods and spread to 30-70 minority:majority neighborhoods. In St. Louis, there were almost no minority-majority integrated communities during the civil rights movement.

Why? Let us examine the history and geology of St. Louis. Unlike other midwestern states, the city is limited by geography the bounds of its expansion. It grew north-south along the river, with expansion inland coming only after the mechanized revolution allowed for cheap drainage of swamps and irrigation canals to be dug. Let us have a snapshot of the city in 1947, after the return of GIs and the beginning of the baby boom:

The city's neighborhoods are aligned north-south, with a central core clearly identified by its density. From the core radiated extensive mass transit networks: southwest down Gravois, northwest up Hodiamont were the two primary streetcar arteries. In addition, several northwest-southwest and west-east heavy rail lines had emerged. Further, there was a north-south line which intersected and allowed route switching running along, roughly, the east boundary of Forest Park. Roughly, where the interstates are now, the commuter rail lines went. In addition, almost all the current freight rail infrastructure was used for interurban commuter service until the 60s and early 70s. If one were to make an animated artery map of St. Louis transit in 1947, they would see a distinct north-south flow towards the core in the morning, and an evening rush outward along these same routes. On the weekend, the core district would be considered westward of the current shell of a downtown--roughly where Fox Theatre and Moolah's are.

What was the impact of this in 1947? On the ground, mass transit use was composed of integrated ridership along a segregated system. Now, I stated that the city was southern because of how much it lacked integration. To cement that statement, take a look at neighborhood racial composition in 1947. What makes St. Louis a southern city? While northern cities would discourage working class communities from integrating through service cuts, they would not outright prohibit an individual from choosing to live in a mixed community. In St. Louis, citizen's groups would. For instance, in Chicago, several inner-ring commuter suburbs grew because of a racially mixed middle and upper class wishing to separate themselves from lower-class hooliganism. If you lived in Bronzeville and made a fortune through honest business, your ambition would be to move to Beverly Hills or Homewood. In St. Louis, white citizen's militias would firebomb, lynch, or rape any individuals who moved to a neighborhood not designated of their race. Once again, it comes back to transit services: while commuties elsewhere in the Midwest attempted to reign in the rate of service integration by codifying sundown laws, there was no need in St. Louis. If you were out of place racially, you were out of place for a specific purpose. There was no fear that you would rob a white house and then use transit to return home. How could there be? Everyone knew where the Germans lived, where the French landholders gravitated, and where the different colored populations were kept. Yes, there were slums; there were segregated slums, by racial hue, class, religion, and mother language.

St. Louis is an old city with an aristocratic French culture. It is slow to change, and only changes when the optics force it to. Why should it do so otherwise? It is the best culture in the world, the most literary, the best artistic, the greatest civil society ever known to man, and it is the responsibility of the masses to recognize the greatness of the elites so that they may share in cultural diffusion.

Individuals are resilliant: humans adapt the power structures they understand as beneficial, and work within those systems to advance their social mobility. If you were poor and darker black, you would live in the poor and dark community. You'd receive services as equal to the Swedish neighborhood acrosd the 90 foot wide boulevard and had the freedom to shop there any time. As long as you returned home to your island in this urban sea when the times called, you would live under the system in place which granted you a better chance at clearly-delineated social mobility. You had full rights and opportunity to be represented by your own community, to be policed by your own community, to feel a member in a greater community. In this sense, St. Louis was still very much a model city of the year 1900 in the year 1947.

In America, there is an ideological blindness towards history: we see it as a continual march forward of rights, of expanding the franchise, yet do not discuss how Boston Marriage was both universally legal and socially accepted in 1900, while now Americans on the whole find it much less so. Living as a young, dark-skinned black male of Bantu descent in Chicago of 1900 would allow one to perceive a greater chance at social mobility than living in Montgommery in 1947. Similarly, to be born in St. Louis as a baby boomer, one would see life in the city as providing a greater chance at mobility than living that same life in Houston, in Birmingham, in Chicago. And why not? The city had systems and treated everyone equally, as long as you followed the rules and returned home when told to. To resist this command would be unthinkable; your neighborhood would shun you, businesses would boycott you, trains and trollies--conducted by your neighbors--ignore you. Simply, you'd be driven out of Missouri and over to East St. Louis and have to pay the tolls any time you wished to visit.

This changed with the interstates. No longer did the exiles have to pay the toll to access the emerald white city; no longer did they have to use clearly known transit routes to return to their homes. The first suburban migration fron St. Louis took place along the major east-west corridor, the modern I-64/40, and was done so by white middle-class individuals looking for the same social dynamics which created the inner-ring suburbs of Chicago and Detroit. They wanted to live with members of other religions, to live with their nice English or Italian or German wife outside their designated neighborhood, to not be shunned by the landed aristocracy for their ethnic mixing. So the Swedish neighborhood experienced out-migration rapidly; so the German neighborhoods moved to Clayton; so the Irish weren't restricted to Soulard's shittiest watering holes and the archgrounds became a quarter-populated slum. So the landed aristocracy of St. Louis was faxing lowered income with equal taxation, and chose to lower rents to a level which even blacks could afford, and so that Swedish-Norweigian area became Kings Oak, became Forest Park Southeast. The city, seeing reduced tax income, cut back on services while following federal incentives to maintain a semblance of a budget. It attempted to create projects to demonstrate to the poor and middle class whites they need not flight from the other whites. Yes, white flight occured in St. Louis, from the city to the county: Unlike the rest of the nation, this white flight was from whites, as had played out in the rest of the nation between 1914 and 1941.

Often, you'll find people apt to say St. Louis is a northern city with a southern culture. The only other city in America like this is Washington, D.C.; ask a local if they mean, "Like D.C.?" Here, we find that remnant of French landowning aristocracy living in a city of German neuvo-riche: You can only compare St. Louis to the city founded by George Washington, engineered by Lafayette, that city which is the crowning jewel of the American nation. I'm here to tell you that St. Louis is not D.C., that it is not the seat of highest government for the greatest nation on earth, that while there were plans for it to be, its slaveholding cousins, its namesake compromise, forced those plans abandoned in their civil war. You screwed the pooch, heriditary aristocracy of the southern breed, and now must live with the consequences.

Enough moralizing and onto concrete examples. When the first suburbs were built, mass transit still operated within the city. As both city and county cut services, as the Federal government reimbursed states for highway spending [a subject I once drove to the Ike library to research, and upon which I hold as the reason that military integration and basic voting rights passed Congress], as the railroads invented Switchbacking to reduce their tax and operating expenses, as service rates and reliability diminshed, as the environmental laws incentivized building tear-down and parking lots for 'clean water runoff,' the city moved from a planned river hub to an unplanned commuter district. The whites integrated. Instead of asking, where are your parents from, the optics made it better to ask, where did you go to highschool.

In that question is revealed the true nature of Eastern Missouri: mass communication has made it unacceptable to discriminate against what majority culture defines as white (we certainly don't, its more important to know your heriditary lineage than 'who sent you' or 'what do you do' or 'what're you inventing today?'. So, instead of accepting those loving kikes or wops, you ask where they went to highschool and learn rapidly to associate the highschool answer with sensible differences: kids from this school smell differently than kids from that school, even if they're just a bunch of drat niggers to me. You know, I like that smell better, at least those niggers are some of the good ones. Please do excuse the crass language; its an accurate representation of the underlying sentiments I observed in St. Louis. And it has sound psychological evidence, sound anthropoligical reasoning.

You should never know how connected someone is by looking at them, which is why other cities have been able to intregrate their administrative offices and share access to elite power. In Chicago, you ask where someone's from and you learn the characters of the neighborhoods and suburbs. You don't ask where someone went to highschool. Its drat impolite to use highschool as the primary indicator of status, since it should be assumed everyone has an opportunity to attend highschool. If you associate highschool eith status, you focus on improving the reputation of your answer. Same for neighborhood, except you can improve neighborhoods with community organizing. You can't improve the reputation of your highschool with community organizing, as the reputation of your highschool is directly tied to its associated reputations.

So you find that highschool becane the heriditary question asked in St. Louis by the boomers, as its just too impolite to ask their parents' question. And in response, you find that the city implemented a desegregated highschool policy during the civil rights movement. As its neighborhoods were emptied, and their shells segregated by perceived barriers that henceforce had not existed, St. Louis became a city of two races: white and black. And as the civil rights movement occured, this newfound freedom of mobility prevented the riots that had hitherfore been seen elsewhere. Riots, as historical events, are the best off-hand proxy for level of racial and economic integration within communities. Riots occur when the rate of physical integration and social integration are unequal. Riots occur when you're the best city in America, when everyone just needs to listen and obey the system and go home when we tell them to because that's how our parents solved these problems and prevented the city from burning down in the 60s and 70s. No, St. Louis has had a much slower burn, the current burn of Detroit: one house at a time, one empty block followed by another, rather than collective action resulting in mass burns.

Another example of concrete policy in St. Louis that is an attempt to cement that "Just return home when we tell you to and everything will be ok" attitude: All the drat roadblocks. You built grid system for a reason--mobility and inter-connection. You built barriers to those grids for another reason--to prevent mobility at the level of the block. While other cities only segregated their working-class neighborhoods with their first highways, St. Louis segregated every community and then went on to segregate every block. Take, for instance, Skinker-DeBalivier and the West End. Both were economic hub communities until the 70s and the outright illegality of purely racial segregation. You can segregate by proxy, never directly. But these neighborhoods? As cars became proxy for individuals, you had to wall off your community from outsiders by creating narrow gateways and restricting access to those who know the locality. Sure, they're sold as measures to 'prevent crime like burglaries,' only because its improper to state that they were erected to prevent access by potential criminals, since this demands that one know who potential criminals are rather than what potential crimes could be. And ask yourself, who do these neighborhoods see as potential criminals? I know the Ferguson PD has its direct answer, for it is the job of the police to know the who, what, where, when, and why of crimes in that order.

I mean, christ, I'd go dancing in NoCo with my African friends and, although they are in the global 1%, although they would come to the meeting in a fitted and custom-tailored suit with the same watch that the Schlaffly or Busch daughters wore, they'd be treated by their race as the primary determinant of their wealth status until a local would associate me with them. And this attitude extended to business meetings and finance, of all places, where one would hope fiscal greed to take paramount importance over heriditary attributes.

So, what can the city do to prevent future riots? Do you want unrealistic policy suggestions or suggestions of what is possible, politically acceptable, and profitable? The first is easy and has obvious answers, and will never happen. The second may be cynical, borderline illegal, certainly immoral, and would still be better than the status quo.

Agrajag posted:

gay

Inevitable posted:

cool thred

Poetic Justice posted:

Why riot now, and not during the Civil Rights Movement?

The answer to this question is surprisingly simple: St. Louis, both city and county, are in transition. Let us examine where race riots had occured during the civil rights movements: Neighborhoods which were the most integrated had the most violent riots. In Chicago, riots occured in communities which had 60-40 majority:minority composition without power sharing in representative government. In Detroit, the riots occured in 70-30 minority:majority neighborhoods and spread to 30-70 minority:majority neighborhoods. In St. Louis, there were almost no minority-majority integrated communities during the civil rights movement.

Why? Let us examine the history and geology of St. Louis. Unlike other midwestern states, the city is limited by geography the bounds of its expansion. It grew north-south along the river, with expansion inland coming only after the mechanized revolution allowed for cheap drainage of swamps and irrigation canals to be dug. Let us have a snapshot of the city in 1947, after the return of GIs and the beginning of the baby boom:

The city's neighborhoods are aligned north-south, with a central core clearly identified by its density. From the core radiated extensive mass transit networks: southwest down Gravois, northwest up Hodiamont were the two primary streetcar arteries. In addition, several northwest-southwest and west-east heavy rail lines had emerged. Further, there was a north-south line which intersected and allowed route switching running along, roughly, the east boundary of Forest Park. Roughly, where the interstates are now, the commuter rail lines went. In addition, almost all the current freight rail infrastructure was used for interurban commuter service until the 60s and early 70s. If one were to make an animated artery map of St. Louis transit in 1947, they would see a distinct north-south flow towards the core in the morning, and an evening rush outward along these same routes. On the weekend, the core district would be considered westward of the current shell of a downtown--roughly where Fox Theatre and Moolah's are.

What was the impact of this in 1947? On the ground, mass transit use was composed of integrated ridership along a segregated system. Now, I stated that the city was southern because of how much it lacked integration. To cement that statement, take a look at neighborhood racial composition in 1947. What makes St. Louis a southern city? While northern cities would discourage working class communities from integrating through service cuts, they would not outright prohibit an individual from choosing to live in a mixed community. In St. Louis, citizen's groups would. For instance, in Chicago, several inner-ring commuter suburbs grew because of a racially mixed middle and upper class wishing to separate themselves from lower-class hooliganism. If you lived in Bronzeville and made a fortune through honest business, your ambition would be to move to Beverly Hills or Homewood. In St. Louis, white citizen's militias would firebomb, lynch, or rape any individuals who moved to a neighborhood not designated of their race. Once again, it comes back to transit services: while commuties elsewhere in the Midwest attempted to reign in the rate of service integration by codifying sundown laws, there was no need in St. Louis. If you were out of place racially, you were out of place for a specific purpose. There was no fear that you would rob a white house and then use transit to return home. How could there be? Everyone knew where the Germans lived, where the French landholders gravitated, and where the different colored populations were kept. Yes, there were slums; there were segregated slums, by racial hue, class, religion, and mother language.

St. Louis is an old city with an aristocratic French culture. It is slow to change, and only changes when the optics force it to. Why should it do so otherwise? It is the best culture in the world, the most literary, the best artistic, the greatest civil society ever known to man, and it is the responsibility of the masses to recognize the greatness of the elites so that they may share in cultural diffusion.

Individuals are resilliant: humans adapt the power structures they understand as beneficial, and work within those systems to advance their social mobility. If you were poor and darker black, you would live in the poor and dark community. You'd receive services as equal to the Swedish neighborhood acrosd the 90 foot wide boulevard and had the freedom to shop there any time. As long as you returned home to your island in this urban sea when the times called, you would live under the system in place which granted you a better chance at clearly-delineated social mobility. You had full rights and opportunity to be represented by your own community, to be policed by your own community, to feel a member in a greater community. In this sense, St. Louis was still very much a model city of the year 1900 in the year 1947.

In America, there is an ideological blindness towards history: we see it as a continual march forward of rights, of expanding the franchise, yet do not discuss how Boston Marriage was both universally legal and socially accepted in 1900, while now Americans on the whole find it much less so. Living as a young, dark-skinned black male of Bantu descent in Chicago of 1900 would allow one to perceive a greater chance at social mobility than living in Montgommery in 1947. Similarly, to be born in St. Louis as a baby boomer, one would see life in the city as providing a greater chance at mobility than living that same life in Houston, in Birmingham, in Chicago. And why not? The city had systems and treated everyone equally, as long as you followed the rules and returned home when told to. To resist this command would be unthinkable; your neighborhood would shun you, businesses would boycott you, trains and trollies--conducted by your neighbors--ignore you. Simply, you'd be driven out of Missouri and over to East St. Louis and have to pay the tolls any time you wished to visit.

This changed with the interstates. No longer did the exiles have to pay the toll to access the emerald white city; no longer did they have to use clearly known transit routes to return to their homes. The first suburban migration fron St. Louis took place along the major east-west corridor, the modern I-64/40, and was done so by white middle-class individuals looking for the same social dynamics which created the inner-ring suburbs of Chicago and Detroit. They wanted to live with members of other religions, to live with their nice English or Italian or German wife outside their designated neighborhood, to not be shunned by the landed aristocracy for their ethnic mixing. So the Swedish neighborhood experienced out-migration rapidly; so the German neighborhoods moved to Clayton; so the Irish weren't restricted to Soulard's shittiest watering holes and the archgrounds became a quarter-populated slum. So the landed aristocracy of St. Louis was faxing lowered income with equal taxation, and chose to lower rents to a level which even blacks could afford, and so that Swedish-Norweigian area became Kings Oak, became Forest Park Southeast. The city, seeing reduced tax income, cut back on services while following federal incentives to maintain a semblance of a budget. It attempted to create projects to demonstrate to the poor and middle class whites they need not flight from the other whites. Yes, white flight occured in St. Louis, from the city to the county: Unlike the rest of the nation, this white flight was from whites, as had played out in the rest of the nation between 1914 and 1941.

Often, you'll find people apt to say St. Louis is a northern city with a southern culture. The only other city in America like this is Washington, D.C.; ask a local if they mean, "Like D.C.?" Here, we find that remnant of French landowning aristocracy living in a city of German neuvo-riche: You can only compare St. Louis to the city founded by George Washington, engineered by Lafayette, that city which is the crowning jewel of the American nation. I'm here to tell you that St. Louis is not D.C., that it is not the seat of highest government for the greatest nation on earth, that while there were plans for it to be, its slaveholding cousins, its namesake compromise, forced those plans abandoned in their civil war. You screwed the pooch, heriditary aristocracy of the southern breed, and now must live with the consequences.

Enough moralizing and onto concrete examples. When the first suburbs were built, mass transit still operated within the city. As both city and county cut services, as the Federal government reimbursed states for highway spending [a subject I once drove to the Ike library to research, and upon which I hold as the reason that military integration and basic voting rights passed Congress], as the railroads invented Switchbacking to reduce their tax and operating expenses, as service rates and reliability diminshed, as the environmental laws incentivized building tear-down and parking lots for 'clean water runoff,' the city moved from a planned river hub to an unplanned commuter district. The whites integrated. Instead of asking, where are your parents from, the optics made it better to ask, where did you go to highschool.

In that question is revealed the true nature of Eastern Missouri: mass communication has made it unacceptable to discriminate against what majority culture defines as white (we certainly don't, its more important to know your heriditary lineage than 'who sent you' or 'what do you do' or 'what're you inventing today?'. So, instead of accepting those loving kikes or wops, you ask where they went to highschool and learn rapidly to associate the highschool answer with sensible differences: kids from this school smell differently than kids from that school, even if they're just a bunch of drat niggers to me. You know, I like that smell better, at least those niggers are some of the good ones. Please do excuse the crass language; its an accurate representation of the underlying sentiments I observed in St. Louis. And it has sound psychological evidence, sound anthropoligical reasoning.

You should never know how connected someone is by looking at them, which is why other cities have been able to intregrate their administrative offices and share access to elite power. In Chicago, you ask where someone's from and you learn the characters of the neighborhoods and suburbs. You don't ask where someone went to highschool. Its drat impolite to use highschool as the primary indicator of status, since it should be assumed everyone has an opportunity to attend highschool. If you associate highschool eith status, you focus on improving the reputation of your answer. Same for neighborhood, except you can improve neighborhoods with community organizing. You can't improve the reputation of your highschool with community organizing, as the reputation of your highschool is directly tied to its associated reputations.

So you find that highschool becane the heriditary question asked in St. Louis by the boomers, as its just too impolite to ask their parents' question. And in response, you find that the city implemented a desegregated highschool policy during the civil rights movement. As its neighborhoods were emptied, and their shells segregated by perceived barriers that henceforce had not existed, St. Louis became a city of two races: white and black. And as the civil rights movement occured, this newfound freedom of mobility prevented the riots that had hitherfore been seen elsewhere. Riots, as historical events, are the best off-hand proxy for level of racial and economic integration within communities. Riots occur when the rate of physical integration and social integration are unequal. Riots occur when you're the best city in America, when everyone just needs to listen and obey the system and go home when we tell them to because that's how our parents solved these problems and prevented the city from burning down in the 60s and 70s. No, St. Louis has had a much slower burn, the current burn of Detroit: one house at a time, one empty block followed by another, rather than collective action resulting in mass burns.

Another example of concrete policy in St. Louis that is an attempt to cement that "Just return home when we tell you to and everything will be ok" attitude: All the drat roadblocks. You built grid system for a reason--mobility and inter-connection. You built barriers to those grids for another reason--to prevent mobility at the level of the block. While other cities only segregated their working-class neighborhoods with their first highways, St. Louis segregated every community and then went on to segregate every block. Take, for instance, Skinker-DeBalivier and the West End. Both were economic hub communities until the 70s and the outright illegality of purely racial segregation. You can segregate by proxy, never directly. But these neighborhoods? As cars became proxy for individuals, you had to wall off your community from outsiders by creating narrow gateways and restricting access to those who know the locality. Sure, they're sold as measures to 'prevent crime like burglaries,' only because its improper to state that they were erected to prevent access by potential criminals, since this demands that one know who potential criminals are rather than what potential crimes could be. And ask yourself, who do these neighborhoods see as potential criminals? I know the Ferguson PD has its direct answer, for it is the job of the police to know the who, what, where, when, and why of crimes in that order.

I mean, christ, I'd go dancing in NoCo with my African friends and, although they are in the global 1%, although they would come to the meeting in a fitted and custom-tailored suit with the same watch that the Schlaffly or Busch daughters wore, they'd be treated by their race as the primary determinant of their wealth status until a local would associate me with them. And this attitude extended to business meetings and finance, of all places, where one would hope fiscal greed to take paramount importance over heriditary attributes.

So, what can the city do to prevent future riots? Do you want unrealistic policy suggestions or suggestions of what is possible, politically acceptable, and profitable? The first is easy and has obvious answers, and will never happen. The second may be cynical, borderline illegal, certainly immoral, and would still be better than the status quo.