How to end our Police problem

It's pretty obvious Jeeves and Destroyourcurrency are at best pretty naïve. I suggest they spend some time in a jail.

 

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More "fun"? It would be a LOT more fun if you took your extremely childish ideas and just got the heck out of Dodge.

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What extremely childish ideas are you talking about? The Obama ass wiping thread?

 

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Why all male citizens? Women can be cops.

And why not just have them ride along with a real cop? They can help out and the cop can keep them from doing anything really stupid.

So if you didn't like banks, you could just help thieves knock over a bank?

 

Banks wouldn't exist in a moneyless society, and I'm sure if they did, the government would be more than happy to destroy them

 

OK. Let's say you don't like your old high school. And when an arsonist happens by, you help him carry the gasoline. Is that what you meant by not enforcing unpopular laws?

 

I can understand vehement rejection of the Republican agenda. At present, the Democratic Party is keeping them from sinking their fangs into the jugular of the US, while Libertarians almost align themselves with the fiscal lunacy and anti-executive agendas of the Tea Party. But if you're in such a minority that the Democratic platform doesn't suit you, you still have third parties, write-ins, referendums, town hall and city council meetings, and jury duty, among various outlets for political expression. Participate and at least try to make a difference. (But I'm not sure what, other than the Democratic platform, is worth worrying about.)

You mean to say Big Money was behind Obama's first acts of office (ending/limiting profiteering from certain public land deals under the Bush era, and protecting a woman's right to equal pay)? What financial stakeholders had an interest in stricter Banking laws, and laws designed the aid to people left homeless by the crash of '07? What fat cat profits from universal health care, or the protection of indigent people who would otherwise be dumped on the streets to die for not paying their bills?

When you figure that out, you might ask what any of those Daddy (& Mommy!) Moneybags ever did to shape the platform Obama ran on, which got him elected by a landslide twice in a row. . .

It's in place!

Do you have this feeling every time your candidate loses? I was glad to see it alive and well during the 2007 election.

Remember: you get what you pay for. Voters knowingly created the present issue (and the 42 past attempts to defund the health law plus the laundry list of obstruction since Republicans took the house). Stupid is as stupid does?

But not trained or authorized to take the law into their own hands, as many a death-row inmate will lament.

The OP is flawed in the presumption that we can draft police the way the military did. There was once an offer to let people do civil service as an alternative to the draft (such as conscientious objectors) but it fizzled out as the lottery system phased in and out. There are enough problems with police forces as it is. I haven't yet heard any rationale for 'fixing what ain't broke'. What in the world world is the presumed need for this, I wonder.

"Under the pretext of law" was coded in the Civil Rights Act as "under color of law" and makes it a punishable tort to discriminate or exclude on the basis of generalizing people to a stereotype. (And when done in commission of a crime it enhances the criminal penalty.) I think if you look a little closer you'll find bullying made unlawful by laws like the Whistleblower Act. Graft, cronyism and influence peddling are generally illegal, depending on the nature of the act. Despotism and pandering seem to cover the meanness and stupidity of Right Wing politics, and obviously some forms of those acts are unlawful. Really, all the voters need to do is to vote the Republicans out of office, and the people who are trying to battle those forms of oppression will have a fighting chance to succeed. (Speaking of which, acts of 'official oppression' are also unlawful.)

But to fix the laws to better protect against official oppression, you need to rewind to the midterm election, when Right Wingers rose up and decided to vote for the kind of judiciary that would tend to turn its back on official it. Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts and Samuel Alito were put on the Supreme Court to protect the kinds of misanthropes you are referring to. Voters aided and abetted the furtherance of misanthropic torts and crimes by putting a Republican majority in the House. Add to this the unprecedented obstruction of Obama's judicial appointees, and you have a new front to face. Not official oppression, but voter meanness and stupidity resulting in Republican obstructionism. Unfortunately the system of checks and balances, and freedom of expression, have allowed a wart to grow on the Republican butt, which is nearly as putrid as the outbreak it had in the Bush years. But it's the wart of meanness and stupidity, which putrifies on about 25% to 40% of butts nationwide. Let's face it, "We the people" includes a lot of psychopaths. Even some of the most wart-ridden Supreme Court Justices had recoiled in horror from scenarios involving "mob rule". That's pretty close to what the Right Wing, Libertarians and anarchists are advocating lately. Sarah Palin's "Annie, Get Your Gun" remark still hangs in the air as a reminder of this.

Someday, somehow, there should be new a Constitutional Convention. The Bill of Rights should be expanded, and the powers of the Republicans to hijack the country should be outlawed. There needs to be a new check for every new imbalance, even if it requires amending the Constitution every time they decide to convert their powers of advice and consent into bullying and pandering to ignorance and Big Money.

 

I don't live there, but the relentless rightward march is spreading to the whole world, fed by money interests which have neither nationality nor loyalties. They use whatever tools they can find and rile up, then discard them when they're no longer effective. Some feeble remnant of the mid-twentieth-century progressive movements fight a forlorn rearguard action on behalf of the citizenry. In the US, that's the Democratic party... and both its influence and its determination are eroding fast. Ideas and reforms are unwelcome: Nothing Can Ever Change.

Too bad.

 

EVERY single thing you've posted here is childish!!

 

If there were no banks, who would keep track of the "credits" that people and organisation would use instead, in your proposed system? You would need someone independent to do this, since you could not rely on everyone to keep track accurately themselves - disputes would be bound to arise.

And wouldn't some people attempt to steal "credits" from others, if they did not have enough to exchange for the goods or services they would like to have? So wouldn't you need somewhere safe to keep them?

 

Sorry, I mistook you for a American! I have noticed many of your posts, but was probably having a Ronald Reagan moment (falling asleep) whenever you made reference to your nationality. Also I didn't catch any distinctive speech (eg. 'whilst' or 'colour')

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I completely agree with your fear of growing right wing sentiment -- it seems to go through phases, just as remarkable phases in meanness and stupidity seem to roll in and out of the times like some kind of maniacal tide. I've often reflected on this, such as in rare moments I've taken note of the British Parliament (and a Prime Minister or two), during a strong bull-headed rallies by Tories, or folks of that ilk. I've driven past "Auf Auslander" graffiti in Germany in one of the Skinhead eras even after one horrific incident in which they torched a foreign woman after dousing her in gasoline. I've been within a stone’s throw of a fistfight in the Parliament of Taiwan. I was across the street when the police riot control buses rolled up to the hall where the parliamentarians were skirmishing, dragging them out kicking and screaming. It began during an assembly, when a Right Wing Parliamentarian threw a microphone at a Liberal, accusing her of collusion with (then full bore Communist) China. I've been confronted by South American soldiers with M-16s during an era when the Right Wing was having people arrested for photographing government officials. I had just snapped a shot of a soldier standing guard where a musical event had been brutally attacked. The singer-songwriter was to have performed some pro-human rights songs. (Fortunately they never noticed my camera, but were routinely harassing passers-by.) And the day my parents took me to Mexico City as a child -- ostensibly to learn a little about world culture -- ours was the only vehicle moving on the street. The city was on lockdown after soldiers brutally massacred students peacefully protesting for human rights. Everyone has personal evidence to support the rational reasons for rejecting the Right; too many simply are simply in denial of the evidence to engage "right thinking" (as in valid logic!)

We could step through all of the countries that have experienced the waves of Right Wing extremism, and easily vow never to tolerate it again. But it conflicts with our tolerance of political expression to say the Right should be banned. Besides, they are (as you noted) factions of Big Money, and not subject to the usual and customary process of checks and balances each democratic country theoretically employs to safeguard against official oppression. It's also evident that Christian missionary movements have also done a great deal of harm in fomenting Right Wing and reactionary movements in countries of the "failed state" category, or the ones known to be almost there. This evidently accounts for some of the strident homophobia in Uganda, for example. I have worked with an immigrant from Africa who was so seriously affected by the America Protestants driven to convert him that he could say "Big Government" before he could ever speak English. There is no doubt that anyone who wants to alter the fate of weaker countries can do so by penetrating the countryside with the motivational methods of evangelical rhetoric. In prior eras there were overt attempts by American industries, government agencies and the World Bank to intervene in the Third World with tactics that favored Big Money and which stood for the Right Wing policy when it espoused war and genocide. This was exploited in dozens of countries during the Cold War, Banana Republics were an earlier model, and before that were those economies that relied on the slave trade. All of these motivations are irrelevant to society today, and yet throngs still crowd the polls, gleefully installing their local demonic Right Wing crackpots and crooks, with the practically religious belief that these wayward politicians are gods.

In those remaining monarchies and the few that have kept their monarchs as figureheads, there is a native cause for the Right to keep a foothold, just as many Royalists have defended the likes of the Shah of Iran. The same could be said for folks loyal to Saddam, Assad or Khadafi, the Kims of Korea, or the more extreme cases, from the likes of Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler to the military triumvirate who slaughtered Argentinians (who became known as Desaparecidos). Americans celebrate with great pomp and circumstance the throwing off of despot King George III of Britain (July 4th fireworks spectacles), but at the same time built their present wealth on the theft of Indian lands and genocide against the tribes, and on the whipped backs of black slaves, and at the peril, oppression and humiliation of Chinese construction workers and Hispanic migrant farm workers, all of whom had every reason to attempt rebellions of their own. But the American Right expressed itself in part through white supremacy, and through its Christian networks it spread the belief that non-Nordic people had no souls, and this contributed to the popular acceptance of oppression and segregation against the minorities. The only reason the US was so strident in opposing South African apartheid when it did was that we had only recently declared segregation illegal before the Soweto uprising brought that spectacle to the world stage.

I really can't explain its resurgence today other than to note that huge masses of any population are easily swayed by bizarre and illogical attitudes that are identical in cause to those that led Americans (esp. the Southern States) to embrace slavery. And those attitudes are founded in meanness and stupidity. Again, this strongly correlates with recent waves of fundamentalist religious ideation, which succeeds in convincing its followers to abandon reason, to deny facts, evidence and scientific expertise, and which is highly xenophobic and cynical of any programs that aid the poor, which, contrary their religious beliefs, include programs that shelter the homeless, give water to the thirsty, support human treatment of prisoners, and provide safety nets for necessary medical aid -- comporting with the command to "visit the sick and imprisoned". It’s this glaring hypocrisy which exposes fundamentalist right wingers for the ugliness of the principles they stand on.

The excuse used to be that any such "socialist" programs were a precursor to (under the Domino Theory ) a chain reaction of worldwide collapse into Sino/Soviet communism. Obviously that entire line of reasoning is long since obsolete. The New Right (at least in the US) has had to fabricate a litany of utterly ludicrous child-like claims which only the stupidest Americans would believe, often gaining more than 50% of voters to back them. Some of the stupidest of claims included the Swift Boat Committee, with so-called witnesses claiming that they had evidence that (then opponent to GW Bush) John Kerry was not a military verteran who had distinguished himself for service awards, or the ongoing simple-minded belief Obama was not born in the US, or any of countless manufactured controversies designed to shock the public conscience in the way the fear of a perceived impending Russian nuclear strike on the US, fulfilling the scenario of mutually assured destruction, and the ensuing Apocalypse, held the Right in the public eye as the Hawks, who were ever battle-ready and better equipped to lead in matters of national defense. In the horrible era of GW Bush, when the American Right was prematurely basking in the supposed glory of defeating world terrorism (George Bush on a carrier with “Mission Accomplished” placard shortly after the wars began), we saw the unprecedented success with Right Wing propaganda, and the ability to reach voters through religious ideology, hauling in all of their garbage from the past antagonisms of non-Nordic people, all the while unraveling the safety nets which led to the 2007 economic collapse.

This is why Right Wingers pose such a threat to any country they infect and why it's so deadly to mix political conservatism with religious fundamentalism, and then to feed it to the dumbest voters as something designed to rescue their economy. Of course the informed voter notices that the doctor now recommends ridding the patient of his tumors, even if surgery is indicated—just vote the bums out of office, that’s all we really need to do. This is completely different than the Right Wing treatment plan, which provides for throwing the medicine in the trash, stealing and shredding the medical file, and wiping the collective consciousness of the patient clean, as if none of the sick historical events such as those I mentioned ever took place.

Of course there is much more to the local politics of every nation, and no one can capture all of this in sweeping generalizations and oversimplifications of posts like this. But hopefully you’ll take solace in knowing that the better informed American voters are at least aware of the larger issues that are driving human nature, and how it is that something as bizarre as Right Wing politics is able to fester in world political stages so long after it has rendered itself obsolete, how it poses a clear and present danger to us all, and why we are all at heart (most of us) “Democrats without borders”.

I guess my advice is to cheer up. With hope and decent education, perhaps future generations won’t be fooled again.

 

The credits would be issued by the state when people did work. When the credits were used for state produced (non essential) goods and services, they would be destroyed. It wouldn't be like money where it stays in circulation and goes into an account. The credits would be "stored" on your ID card, kind of like how my college ID card is used to "store" credit that is used. The ID card can be used off campus at some businesses, but they give the 'credits' used there back to the college, and get real money in exchange for that. Then the credits are destroyed when they are returned to the college system. They don't go into some kind of account.

I would call the moneyless credit system MarxCredit, and when you use MarxCredits at a private business (if such a thing exists in the moneyless society) then the credit would be transferred to the business owners card. When he/she spent it on state products or service, the credits would be destroyed.

 

I wonder if that would work for me, going to some third world country and preaching that God wants money to be destroyed because it is the root of all evil. After all, it says that in the Bible. You think I could convince them?

 

Prior? They're busy doing it right now. Not only in the Third World (which, btw, who designated thus? And on what basis are first and second worlds rated?) but everywhere.
The xtian surge eastward is part of it: as soon as the USSR hegemony began to crumble, the missionaries were sent in to soften up the populace, ahead of the American capitalists who bought up, cheap, all sources of profit and power, including politicians. Just as the missionaries went into colonial Africa and the Americas, right behind the conquering armies and ahead of the planters and miners. They're being used the same way in modern America (Now, some of the less insane Repubs find themselves riding a tiger: can't control it; can't reason with it; can't get off) and England, (where it looks like becoming a real struggle between secular government and religious factions) though not very effective in western Europe.

These are not waves of public sentiment that just happen spontaneously; this is the same pattern, over and over gain, orchestrated by the same kind of people: the greediest and most ruthless. About once every 200 years, they go too far, get their heads cut off and leave a chaotic aftermath. The civic minded clean up, build safeguards, re-organize society... and then it starts again.

 

Yep. Of course, the money interests have already sold them a shitload of guns, so you'd better convince them quickly.

 

At first blush, it seems like an okay idea, OP--but, then the George Zimmerman trial comes to mind. There are police officers who abuse their authority but your suggestion would breed vigilante type "justice," I'm thinking. George Zimmerman is one such example of someone who volunteered to be part of his "neighborhood watch" group, and couldn't handle the "authority" given to him.

I shudder to think of how many other George Zimmerman scenarios would play out if we did away with our police force and allowed civilians to "protect" their suburbs/cities.

 

You would be confronted with the fundamentalist pro-Capitalism (actually, anti-Communism) claim that Jesus overturned God's earlier information that money is the root of all evil, by yielding on the matter of giving to Caesar what is Caesar's.

Of course one of the linchpins of religious fundamentalism involves perversion of the tenets of the orthodox religion, so anything is possible. I suppose once you've mastered that art you would abandon your present ideas for "loftier" ones. That being said, the Communist experiments of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and the many pro-Communist revolutions of the Cold War era, were founded on appeals to the envy that accompanies wealth, formulated as "the evils of Capitalism". In many cases this did resonate with indigenous Christians, but probably more as it underscores Jesus's commands to tend to the needs of the underprivileged, which is of course the mantra of the American Democrats, and the vindictive bane of mean stupid Republicans, who love to claim Democratic policy is retro-Communist.

But it's not why you wouldn't succeed. You simply can't expect to launch a movement on an impractical or vague ideal. As I understand you the goal isn't to eradicate currency but to engender a paradigm shift in culture. I recall you were advocating for low-impact living--it's a great ideal -- but not clear enough to start a movement. The goals need to be stated up front. I'm not sure how or why the things you are advocating for (elimination of currency and professional police) directly tie to any top level goal, since you didn't open that way. So I'm left to guess this all has to do with saving the planet.

It just depends on what you are actually seeking, which isn't really clear to me. It would help if you would point out what "first principles" you are advocating for. You could get huge support for a movement to protect the environment, if that's your goal. But eradicating currency and the police aren't seen as direct causes of environmental damage. So you would first need an actual platform to stand on. The Cold War provided a great wealth of ideological exploitation for the Right Wing to fester and infect societies. Religion was its Petri dish. But the goals have always been clear -- to return to laissez faire economics -- even though the smoke screen pyro- technicians are always hard at work, fogging up the public's collective memory that this is all the Republicans have ever been advocating. Social conservatism is just a dog bone to them -- they throw Row v Wade to their gullible Christian recruits just to wrap them around their little finger.

My intent was illustrate how the evangelical movement -- sending missionaries to the Third World -- dovetailed with the older model of American impresarios exploiting their human and natural resources. The present day homophobia in Uganda -- to the extent it's the legacy of Christian missionary activity there -- stems from the arrival of Christians interested in exploitation of mineral resources (esp. first the S. African diamonds, but later oil deposits around the continent). That would be a thesis that partly explains the resistance movement that is sabotaging African pipelines.

So what it is you are actually advocating? What is your guiding theory? That's not clear to me.

 

I think the World Bank is all but dissolved. The CIA isn't waging war on pro-Communist "subversives". That kind of thing. "Third World" was the term that implies that the CIA and the World Bank are knocking on your door in connection with Cold War politics and the Right Wing doctrines of that era.

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain this lost its earlier political focus. I do remember there was a mixed sense of fear about Russian instability, along with euphoria that the world had become a grab bag. Global monetary pacts between unlikely partners like China were not yet in the public consciousness. I agree with you that there was a surge in missionary activity, although I noticed it in the early Reagan years. I'm sure it found great opportunities to expand once the Commies were out of the picture. Although American capitalists once claimed Divine Right to buy the world, that club has now been joined by billionaires across the planet.

That would explain why black American fundamentalists so heavily outnumber black American orthodox Christians, and why the black Central and South Americans were once primarily Catholic, and why they are a different demographic today.

I think this explains why Europe is often a source of derision for the Republican Party. Europeans (and our perception of the better educated Brits) are immune to the inroads fundies have made in rural America, where illiteracy was the natural consequence of forsaking all civilization just to get a piece of free land to farm. It's one of the great ironies of American greatness, that it's founded on ignorance. Europeans (and Brits) evolved their intelligence, over centuries of wrangling over different paradigms for government, long after building some of the best universities in the world. Hence they are feared by Republicans. It's like the "Ugly American" tourist syndrome, come home to roost. The Old World has its continuity--and certainly plenty of Right Wingers--but they can't fool the voters as easily as their stupider American counterparts are fooled by Republicans.

I had it in mind that the barely literate voters who embraced the Right were whipped into a frenzy by themes that parallel evangelism -- later the preachers just took up residence inside the political organizations, and vice versa. There has been a shift away from the older paradigms -- say the oil and railroad tycoons of the last century -- to likes of the Koch Bros. Among the most insidious of their tactics is total mind control of their constituents, almost exactly the way Communist mind control was feared, only in the reverse orientation, one that implicitly favors the profits of the ever-fatter Fat Cats. There was a report I saw recently about some new landmark -- a million millionaires in America? Something like that. Some new indicator that the wealth are getting wealthier in phenomenal numbers. These will likely be mostly Right Wingers, I presume. But the ones to fear are the ultra-powerful quasi-trillionaires. How or why a miserable bottom paid worker would want to contribute to the coffers of a trillionaire, all predicated on Reagan's trickle-down economics, is beyond me. It simply speaks to the insidious nature of Right Wing mind control among the most vulnerable voters, esp. the barely literate and highly impressionable fundamentalists among them.

Maybe this cycle is a decaying resonance that began around the time of the Reformation. One thing is for sure: our collective conscious is nearly fully wired, and coming generations will have free access to all the information necessary to form sound independent conclusions about the state of the world, who's lying, and who's not. That would be my optimistic view of the future -- that some of the more puzzling manifestations of ignorance in the age of the internet -- such as we see played out on the stage of Republican politics -- will probably die out.

 

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