The Political Satire/Meme Thread

  • Thread starter Danoff
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If you have even half a brain cell you reword it so it sounds like you came up with it independently.
 
F145BA20-D7D0-4A8D-815F-95B9FD0ECCCB.jpeg
 
Danoff
Maybe the issue is not the budget.
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Not solely, but I do think the budget contributes to the overall problem. Politicians like to score quick points by increasing law enforcement funding since they tout it as making the community safer due to reduced crime. While that can be a result, like any government entity, I think the more likely end game are the departments spending money on needless stuff because if they don't, they'll lose the budget. Spread this out over the years and now you've effectively militarized the police with a bunch of equipment they don't need. Special units are also created where departments can outfit a smaller group with more robust weapons as well.

With increased equipment or constantly changing equipment, you get cops who receive less training due to an ever-changing curriculum.

So while it's not exactly the amount from the budget, it's how the budget is spent that's the problem. If departments don't spend the money on proper training for the officers, then the budget shouldn't get approved. Just signing a blank check to buy equipment doesn't do anything to help with community safety outside giving citizens the illusion that they are protected.
 
Joey D
like any government entity, I think the more likely end game are the departments spending money on needless stuff because if they don't, they'll lose the budget.
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Corporate America does this as well. This is all large entities.

Joey D
So while it's not exactly the amount from the budget, it's how the budget is spent that's the problem.
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1000%

Generally we're not seeing police brutality coming from the local police Stealth Bomber, and more from trigger happy police using weapons they all have equipped no matter what - like batons, handguns, and even tasers. Spend the budget on training, a lot of training, and a lot of vetting.

It's worth noting that some of the police budget goes to body cams.
 
Danoff
Corporate America does this as well. This is all large entities.



1000%

Generally we're not seeing police brutality coming from the local police Stealth Bomber, and more from trigger happy police using weapons they all have equipped no matter what - like batons, handguns, and even tasers. Spend the budget on training, a lot of training, and a lot of vetting.

It's worth noting that some of the police budget goes to body cams.
Click to expand...
I see it as an entitlement issue - in most cases*. Police feel entitled to absolute obedience from the civilian population, and when they don't receive it, they completely lose control of themselves and consider any means of reestablishing their superiority as justified. I think it's clearly evident in Memphis - they beat this guy to death because he challenged their authority. The simple truth is that I think the wrong type of people become police. I've known a few people who ended up as police officers and most of them had a common denominator, their interest was having authority over people, not any kind of public service sentiment. I'm not sure how you fix this problem with training. There needs to be a full paradigm shift in how policing works.

The other problem is that the USA has some pretty bad criminals and way too many guns - every traffic stop has the potential to escalate into a firefight. I don't know how you even begin to fix that.

*In some cases, I think its a fear issue.
 
Eunos_Cosmo
I see it as an entitlement issue - in most cases*. Police feel entitled to absolute obedience from the civilian population, and when they don't receive it, they completely lose control of themselves and consider any means of reestablishing their superiority as justified. I think it's clearly evident in Memphis - they beat this guy to death because he challenged their authority. The simple truth is that I think the wrong type of people become police. I've known a few people who ended up as police officers and most of them had a common denominator, their interest was having authority over people, not any kind of public service sentiment. I'm not sure how you fix this problem with training. There needs to be a full paradigm shift in how policing works.

The other problem is that the USA has some pretty bad criminals and way too many guns - every traffic stop has the potential to escalate into a firefight. I don't know how you even begin to fix that.

*In some cases, I think its a fear issue.
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Honestly I would have thought that body cameras would fix that. Self-preservation may fix some of it - through the repeal of qualified immunity. You're right that the wrong type of people are drawn to police work. And you're also right that every traffic stop can be death for the police, and fear is an issue. We may need an entire group within the police that is designed as quality control. Training can definitely help - starting with toning down the "any twitch from the person you pulled over is a move for a deadly weapon" hype. Currently (at least based on the last I heard), we teach officers by repeatedly showing them footage of officers being shot in what appeared to be benign stops. If they're afraid, we intentionally exaggerate that fear in current training. We need a training overhaul, but of course we need more. Psychological profiles, training in civilian rights, prosecution of bad police, and more quality control measures to find bad cops and remove them before they harm people.

That's where the budget needs to go.
 
Danoff
He's the one ruining his life. Explain to me how a rich person can ruin your life legally.
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Not legally in a direct sense per say, but it's no secret at this point that the Republican party's modus operandi is the classic "divide and conquer" strategy employed by autocratic regimes. Make the everyman, especially those who are less educated and economically empowered, pit their fear and ager towards their fellow man over those who actually leverage power- being elected officials, bureaucrats, and the ultra-rich. Fox News, for example, ran by oligarchs and is in almost direct communication with the RNC, constantly drones on about fearing LGBT people (especially transgender indviduals), illegal immigrants, ANTIFA, black-on-black crime, and anything else that could be possibly branded as "woke". Absent are concerns, at least not in any serious capacity, of economic inequality, anti-labor legislation, or really any policy-focused discussion, instead encouraging viewers to be more afraid of what they deem as "woke" or "degenerate". The ultimate aim is of course to strip the viewer of having any sense of class consciousness, and this effort has been largely successful.
 
GranTurNismo
Not legally in a direct sense per say, but it's no secret at this point that the Republican party's modus operandi is the classic "divide and conquer" strategy employed by autocratic regimes. Make the everyman, especially those who are less educated and economically empowered, pit their fear and ager towards their fellow man over those who actually leverage power- being elected officials, bureaucrats, and the ultra-rich. Fox News, for example, ran by oligarchs and is in almost direct communication with the RNC, constantly drones on about fearing LGBT people (especially transgender indviduals), illegal immigrants, ANTIFA, black-on-black crime, and anything else that could be possibly branded as "woke". Absent are concerns, at least not in any serious capacity, of economic inequality, anti-labor legislation, or really any policy-focused discussion, instead encouraging viewers to be more afraid of what they deem as "woke" or "degenerate". The ultimate aim is of course to strip the viewer of having any sense of class consciousness, and this effort has been largely successful.
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That's an interesting interpretation and not what I had in mind when seeing that image. If it's to be understood as saying that rich people are funding the fearmongering of the republican party, it does seem to make sense.
 
GranTurNismo
Post image
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Here's a classic example of the way racism has worked in American society:

Built in 1919, the Fairground Park pool in St. Louis, Missouri, was the largest in the country and probably the world, with a sandy beach, an elaborate diving board, and a reported capacity of ten thousand swimmers. When a new city administration changed the parks policy in 1949 to allow Black swimmers, the first integrated swim ended in bloodshed. On June 21, two hundred white residents surrounded the pool with “bats, clubs, bricks and knives” to menace the first thirty or so Black swimmers. Over the course of the day, a white mob that grew to five thousand attacked every Black person in sight around the Fairground Park. After the Fairground Park Riot, as it was known, the city returned to a segregation policy using public safety as a justification, but a successful NAACP lawsuit reopened the pool to all St. Louisans the following summer. On the first day of integrated swimming, July 19, 1950, only seven white swimmers attended, joining three brave Black swimmers under the shouts of two hundred white protesters. That first integrated summer, Fairground logged just 10,000 swims—down from 313,000 the previous summer. The city closed the pool for good six years later. Racial hatred led to St. Louis draining one of the most prized public pools in the world.

Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration received the official blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971. The city council in Jackson, Mississippi, had responded to desegregation demands by closing four public pools and leasing the fifth to the YMCA, which operated it for whites only. Black citizens sued, but the Supreme Court, in Palmer v. Thompson, held that a city could choose not to provide a public facility rather than maintain an integrated one, because by robbing the entire public, the white leaders were spreading equal harm. “There was no evidence of state action affecting Negroes differently from white,” wrote Justice Hugo Black. The Court went on to turn a blind eye to the obvious racial animus behind the decision, taking the race neutrality at face value. “Petitioners’ contention that equal protection requirements were violated because the pool-closing decision was motivated by anti-integration considerations must also fail, since courts will not invalidate legislation based solely on asserted illicit motivation by the enacting legislative body.” The decision showed the limits of the civil rights legal tool kit and forecast the politics of public services for decades to come: If the benefits can’t be whites-only, you can’t have them at all. And if you say it’s racist? Well, prove it.

As Jeff Wiltse writes in his history of pool desegregation, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, “Beginning in the mid-1950s northern cities generally stopped building large resort pools and let the ones already constructed fall into disrepair.” Over the next decade, millions of white Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with Black people; desegregation in the mid-fifties coincided with a surge in backyard pools and members-only swim clubs. In Washington, D.C., for example, 125 new private swim clubs were opened in less than a decade following pool desegregation in 1953. The classless utopia faded, replaced by clubs with two-hundred-dollar membership fees and annual dues. A once-public resource became a luxury amenity, and entire communities lost out on the benefits of public life and civic engagement once understood to be the key to making American democracy real.
 
Biggles
Here's a classic example of the way racism has worked in American society:

Built in 1919, the Fairground Park pool in St. Louis, Missouri, was the largest in the country and probably the world, with a sandy beach, an elaborate diving board, and a reported capacity of ten thousand swimmers. When a new city administration changed the parks policy in 1949 to allow Black swimmers, the first integrated swim ended in bloodshed. On June 21, two hundred white residents surrounded the pool with “bats, clubs, bricks and knives” to menace the first thirty or so Black swimmers. Over the course of the day, a white mob that grew to five thousand attacked every Black person in sight around the Fairground Park. After the Fairground Park Riot, as it was known, the city returned to a segregation policy using public safety as a justification, but a successful NAACP lawsuit reopened the pool to all St. Louisans the following summer. On the first day of integrated swimming, July 19, 1950, only seven white swimmers attended, joining three brave Black swimmers under the shouts of two hundred white protesters. That first integrated summer, Fairground logged just 10,000 swims—down from 313,000 the previous summer. The city closed the pool for good six years later. Racial hatred led to St. Louis draining one of the most prized public pools in the world.

Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration received the official blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971. The city council in Jackson, Mississippi, had responded to desegregation demands by closing four public pools and leasing the fifth to the YMCA, which operated it for whites only. Black citizens sued, but the Supreme Court, in Palmer v. Thompson, held that a city could choose not to provide a public facility rather than maintain an integrated one, because by robbing the entire public, the white leaders were spreading equal harm. “There was no evidence of state action affecting Negroes differently from white,” wrote Justice Hugo Black. The Court went on to turn a blind eye to the obvious racial animus behind the decision, taking the race neutrality at face value. “Petitioners’ contention that equal protection requirements were violated because the pool-closing decision was motivated by anti-integration considerations must also fail, since courts will not invalidate legislation based solely on asserted illicit motivation by the enacting legislative body.” The decision showed the limits of the civil rights legal tool kit and forecast the politics of public services for decades to come: If the benefits can’t be whites-only, you can’t have them at all. And if you say it’s racist? Well, prove it.

As Jeff Wiltse writes in his history of pool desegregation, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, “Beginning in the mid-1950s northern cities generally stopped building large resort pools and let the ones already constructed fall into disrepair.” Over the next decade, millions of white Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with Black people; desegregation in the mid-fifties coincided with a surge in backyard pools and members-only swim clubs. In Washington, D.C., for example, 125 new private swim clubs were opened in less than a decade following pool desegregation in 1953. The classless utopia faded, replaced by clubs with two-hundred-dollar membership fees and annual dues. A once-public resource became a luxury amenity, and entire communities lost out on the benefits of public life and civic engagement once understood to be the key to making American democracy real.
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Recent years have seen a return to community pools. It's sad that we've gone for so long without them. Pools are definitely something to borrow rather than buy.
 
Danoff
Recent years have seen a return to community pools. It's sad that we've gone for so long without them. Pools are definitely something to borrow rather than buy.
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Not necessarily. In summer 2022, some NYC pools closed for the season- and some more entirely, due to a lifeguard shortage. Not enough lifeguards were willing to work for the city's $16 lifeguard wage. Many other cities across the country have closed pools for that exact reason, or simply because they are not willing to upkeep the costs associated with operating them.
 
GranTurNismo
Not necessarily. In summer 2022, some NYC pools closed for the season- and some more entirely, due to a lifeguard shortage. Not enough lifeguards were willing to work for the city's $16 lifeguard wage. Many other cities across the country have closed pools for that exact reason, or simply because they are not willing to upkeep the costs associated with operating them.
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I've got 3 kids, I'm acutely aware of the lifeguard shortage. For now (during the winter) it seems we're limping along, I do wonder if we'll have enough next summer.
 

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