More than 140 Characters: On Ferguson

[redpikachu]

Wow, it's been over two years since I've been here. During that time, I went back once to rant about this or that, but LJ was down! It's up now, and I'm going to go on a soapbox-styled rant. I'm typically preoccupied with some anime or game I'm obsessed with, personal garbage, and then a political issue eating me up inside. For a while it was the

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[dorchadas]

Ugh.

Like I said on Twitter, the War on Drugs bears most of the blame that isn't the fault of racism, though honestly it's a mostly-overlapping Venn diagram. Events like the Newhall Massacre led to a perception that cops were outgunned, leading to heavily-armed SWAT units, and then the War in Iraq ended up with a ton of businesses profiting off the war who wanted the gravy train to continue, so they started selling to LEOs after the war wound down. And all that equipment is expensive to have and maintain, so once you get it, the temptation is to use it in order to prove that it's necessary. You end up with the police in body armor as faceless Legions of Terror, and that's probably the worst possible way to relate to a community that has little to no reason to trust them.

There's a lot of little decisions and incentives that all add up into a huge pile of bad, and add in institutional racism and it's just a giant shit sandwich.

[redpikachu]

I wasn't aware of the Newhall Massacre. (I don't recall if it was mentioned in Zinn's APHUS.) The defense budget is so irrationally large, they have to put all those weapons, tanks and gear somewhere. The problem is to a point where the federal government needs to step in, but we all know how that goes. Race riots have been happening since the dawn of time in the US, and the whole thing just seems hopeless.

I need ice cream or something.

[dorchadas]

Yeah. As always, the military-industrial complex has a lot to answer for. :-\

I think that since the Civil Rights Act, the best results generally do come from the Feds stepping in and smacking down local assholes. That's why I take an extremely suspicious look at anyone who says anything about states' rights.

I mean, it all goes back to that Lee Atwater quote:You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”-that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
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So if you ever see me arguing that economic conservatism is based on racism, well...