Grim Meathook Future Watch
That's from a video called "The Largest Street Gang In America," which is making the rounds for a good reason. It was disturbing to watch: I had to pause many times while watching so that I would stop shaking. It has one of the things that make documentaries compelling: footage that speaks for itself. One clip after another shows police officers behaving not like peace officers and civil servants, but like the biggest and best-funded gang on the street. No re-enactments, very minimal commentary: just footage of actual police actions and the account of victims and witnesses.
This presses the Let's Make Connections button in my head, so I'm going to see where that goes.
The first obvious parallel that springs to mind is that police brutality is under-reported in the same way that right-wing terrorism and terrorism perpetrated by the US' government is. It doesn't fit with the Official Narrative, and so falls out of the summaries and digest versions. It survives only as fragmentary forms when it makes it into those infostreams, obfuscating the pattern in it. If you look at the data directly, the trend is much easier to see. It is no longer "a few bad apples," it's a serious systemic problem that's going unaddressed.
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
Once you think that we live in a third-world plutocracy, then all of a sudden everything begins to make sense.
One of the major interactions I'm wondering about is economic. The US' history of imprisoning too many people is catching up with us: at least in CA, the Department of Corrections is undergoing cuts and there are a number of municipalities that are poised to stop prosecuting misdemeanors because they can't afford to. Politically, it's usually impossible to downsize police forces, for pretty much the same reasons that it's impossible to get Congress to pull firmly on the Pentagon's leash. The incentive structure has gone toxic on multiple levels. It is now in a self-reinforcing pattern that, on the large scale, is purely destructive. So something needs to pop them/us out of that cycle. This is a tall order. If you flip over to Jared Diamond's books, though, it's pretty clear what continuing iterations of the cycle will lead to decades down the road, and there are other people pointing out that the near future, without significant change, holds unfettered fascism.
Self-reinforcing patterns can generate very complex emergent effects. While it's tempting to say that the lunatics currently running the asylum are brand-new, the crazy tree's roots are deep. Saying that it's a brand new, unknown problem buys into the Kids These Days Got No Respect fallacy and ignores that the mental habits that produce the crazy behavior are very old ones. The only new layer is modern communication technology, and that isn't as transformative as we sometimes believe. Bigger, faster, louder lies. On the bright side, that communications technology is why there's near-ubiquitous video and stills, why we have so much footage of these incidents. It comes back to that Transparent Society question: the cameras are everywhere. The only question is: who gets to watch? It's also funny to watch interest groups bouncing off one another: there's the police video, then there's Sara Robinson, whom I idolize, recommending getting the police to do something about violent fascists, which is a bit problematic in light of recent terrorism, and oh yeah the guy who made the above documentary is a Ron Paul booster. Great. Streams are crossing.
I had a family conversation recently that this also reminds me of, about the quality of information on the Internet. Just because anyone can publish, doesn't mean that editors are useless. The gatekeeping function of editors is not just quality-of-technical-skills, now, it's quality of reputation. We have some crowdsourced reputation-management tools, but I don't see any one becoming a lingua franca of reputation. It seems to be a network-effect problem, where people have to invest in the network to see any benefit from it, and benefit is minimal before critical mass. So it comes around again to needing Whuffie, in the whimsical formulation, or to just needing to prepare for the Grim Meathook Future, in another.