“It pitted police against the communities that they serve,” says neuroscientist Carl Hart in my new video. Hart, former chair of Columbia University’s Psychology department, grew up in a tough Miami neighborhood where he watched crack cocaine wreck lives. When he started researching drugs, he assumed that research would confirm the damage drugs did.
Tag: prison
Politics Reason Behind a Lot of Anger
Politics forces everyone along the same path. Legislation dictates things only our ethics and morals should determine. To understand the anger, notice how politics makes a difference of opinion into a life and death struggle. An unnecessary one.
Defense for The Incapable
A common tactic from those who want to at least appear to have an argument against abolishing the police is to either claim that they themselves are incapable of protecting their own life, liberty, or property, or to try to scapegoat someone else as being incapable. Nonsense.
Roof Koreans: How Civilians Defended Koreatown from Racist Violence During the 1992 LA Riots
The riots of the spring of 2020 are far from without precedent in the United States. Indeed, they seem to happen once a generation at least. The 1992 Los Angeles Riots are such an example of these “generational riots.” And while most people know about the riots, less known – though quite well known at the time – were the phenomenon of the so-called “Roof Koreans.”
Censorship is a Loser Move
Censorship is running rampant, but I’ve seen people argue that it’s not censorship unless government is doing it. That’s not correct. Censorship doesn’t only refer to government action.
Laughter Killed the Devil
Evil is self-serious. Oppressors and statists can only live by fear. Fear is the only thing they have. If they are not feared, they are nothing. They are a threat only to the extent people fear them as such. There is nothing – nothing – done by the state and the dictators who run it that can be done if people do not fear them.
Technocracy is Evil and Inhumane
Fuck the cold metallic gloved dead hand of human chess playing technocratic ghouls who want to squelch and contain and document and track and sterilize it to death.
On Pandemics
96% of positive coronavirus cases were asymptomatic across 4 US state prisons, according to research by Reuters. I’d heard previously that asymptomatic persons numbered 50-70% of positive coronavirus cases. If most people who get the virus never show any symptoms, and if total case mortality is well below 1%, is COVID-19 really a pandemic?
State Priorities, Not State “Capacity”
In the last few years, social scientists have started heavily appealing to “state capacity” to explain the wealth of nations. Why do some countries prosper? Because they have great state capacity. Why do others flounder? Because they have crummy state capacity. What do floundering countries need to do in order to prosper? Build state capacity, naturally.
After the Pandemic: Back to School, or Forward to a Better Future?
One major silver lining in the United States is that the nation’s patchwork of government-operated daycare centers / day prisons / drone worker boot camps, aka “public schools,” have temporarily shut down as part of the effort to slow the spread of the disease.