You seem to suffer little chagrin by guffawing at people who experience this time in history with great fear, terror, and hopelessness. I appreciate the "cool-your-tits" attitude in regards to chicken-littling, but I can't accept the same sense of vague disinterest with serious, day-to-day issues. You just seem to live for the peanut-gallery, and less for the subject matter of the performance.
We've actually had a form of this discussion before. It's about having a sense of history and awareness of scale. Some kind of perspective to work with.
One person is dead, 19 are wounded because of an individuals actions. There's a good chance the individuals actions were heavily motivated by some terrible ideology. Or a mental illness. Good chance of some combination, one exacerbating the other, right? That's how this stuff always seems to wind up like the last big news deal with the baseball shooter guy.
How many were murdered yesterday in the drug war? Not only by the state but by the conditions the state creates by forcing conflict resolution into a violent and illegal forum. That includes an extensive undermining of natural regulatory forces. How many in the war on terror and its related adventures? How many died in Venezeula, in North Korea, in China, in Russia due to their own wars against the basic tenets of humanity? How many from basic everyday racism? Yesterday, not today in one location where everyone was paying attention and hyped up for before hand. But everywhere else. What kind of dragnet do I need to run through those news stories until I've built up a list where we can say okay, we've got a big fat list of terrible shit that was done deliberately yesterday equal to one man driving his car into a crowd today. Also, we can go and include all the other stuff that happened today that left people dead or worse.
I'm supposed to be frightened, to be mortified, to be worked up into a white hot rage about what is ultimately a type of random chaos of prominent individual events when there's a deliberate order of horrors perpetrated in
my name that doesn't cease, that doesn't improve, that exists only purely to perpetuate itself and its horrors. When you stop and think about it, it's pretty weird to be freaking out, to use a metric for this thread, at the level of twelve-ish GAF threads, about what is ultimately an uncontrollable one-off event and a hideous big league man's incompetent helpless response to something he can't actually control. This gets back to what was the question I was asking etoliate. Okay, so it's denounced, then what? Radicals don't stop, lunatics don't stop because they're denounced. And this is all stuff that we're hanging in a delicate orrery of "it creates an atmosphere that blah blah blah" horseshit when we have the same man heading an organization that is not metaphorically but literally causing extensive harm to many. Every day. Not one day that will be THE TOPIC until the next one comes along where we gotta go just as hard or harder. No, every god damn day. And nobody really gives a fucking shit about it.
You want to tackle serious day-to-day issues, you want to get into the subject matter. Then it all has to be on the table, doesn't it? Especially the shit we don't want to talk about because it's even more horrible to contemplate and explore than the stuff we secretly kinda do because it's got real nice stark contrasts in its morals and boy is it easy to turn it into a shooting gallery when we're literally taking on the very thing we've mocked for decades as trite and cliche. Fucking fascists. And the unpopular kind too. Hey, the ACLU got a lot of play for their role in this whole affair, I wonder what other cases they're up to.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Henry Ayo, a resident of East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana, says that when he appeared before a judge via closed-circuit television for his bail hearing on August 8, 2016, the judge did not ask him about himself or his case before she set his bail. The judge then told Ayo that, upon his release, his pre-trial supervision would be handled by a private Baton Rouge company, Rehabilitation Home Incarceration (RHI).
It took Ayo's wife two months to gather up enough money to post his $8,000 bail, but when she did, RHI told her she would also have to pay the company another $525 before Ayo would be released, then another $225 a month while he was awaiting trial. According to a contract Ayo was required to sign, he could be sent back to jail for violating the agreement.
Ayo's story is one of several alleged in a federal class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Southern Poverty Law Center last night. The suit accuses RHI, Louisiana state judge Trudy White, and East Baton Rouge Parish of racketeering and extortion. According to the lawsuit, the bail scheme has forced hundreds of criminal defendants to pay RHI—a company with political connections to White—to be released from jail, "effectively holding them for ransom" and violating their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
"This is predatory and illegal," Brandon Buskey, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project, said in a statement. "Rehabilitation Home Incarceration puts its own price on people's liberty and forces them to pay up, over and over again. Worse, this could not happen without the court and the jail enabling this scam, and ignoring the rights of those charged and presumed innocent."
The lawsuit is the latest in a string of legal actions across the country—in Georgia, Mississippi, Massachusetts, Alabama, Texas, Illinois, and California—challenging what civil libertarians say amount to debtors' prisons, where defendants are stuck behind bars simply because they cannot afford to pay.
According to the Louisiana lawsuit, defendants' monthly payments to RHI typically last 90 days but sometimes run indefinitely, until the resolution of their case. Defendants may also be billed for ankle bracelets and mandatory classes.
RHI is the only approved vendor for pre-trial supervision in White's court, the 19th Judicial District Court of Louisiana, although there is no formal contract between the court and RHI, the suit says. White has referred roughly 300 defendants to RHI over the last two years. The suit also says the sheriff and warden of East County Parish enforce a policy of not releasing arrestees without permission from RHI.
Oh, well, that one doesn't have anyone literally dead, so it's not too serious. What's this next story here.
On July 31, an undercover cop in Columbus, Georgia, invited a 51-year-old woman into his car and offered her $5 for oral sex. When she rebuffed his offer and tried to get out, he arrested the woman for loitering for the purpose of prostitution. The woman was booked into the Muscogee County Jail, where she still remains.
On Sunday morning, CPD officers arrested a 24-year-old homeless woman for allegedly waving at two passing cars from the side of the road. After the second car stopped and let her in, officers pulled it over. The woman, who had just been released from the county jail a few weeks prior and told them her name was the Virgin Mary, was charged with loitering for the purpose of prostitution and giving false information to police.
Last summer, 24-year-old C. Williams was arrested while sitting at a bus stop because, as Officer Jason Carden explained, Williams was carrying condoms and "dressed as a woman," despite records that said male. "Based off of that information, we charged him with loitering for the purpose of prostitution and took him to the Muscogee County Jail," Carden testified in court. (Williams told the court it was pink men's clothing, not women's clothing.) The judge handed down a sentence of 20 days in jail or a $200 fine.
Well, that's not too bad really either. Can we at least find some deaths jeez.
Brown University medical anthropologist Jennifer J. Carroll and her collaborators interviewed 149 opioid users in Rhode Island and found very little support for such claims. "Our findings directly contradict this narrative," they report in their IJDP article. "Interviewed heroin users overwhelmingly indicated that they prefer to avoid fentanyl-contaminated heroin whenever possible....When they do encounter fentanyl-contaminated heroin, many users report greatly disliking and often fearing the unpredictability of its effects."
The initial effects of fentanyl are more intense than heroin's, but not necessarily in a good way. The interviewees described the experience as overwhelming and incapacitating, and "a general consensus emerged that the effects of fentanyl are distinctly uncomfortable or distressing," with many users describing an unpleasant "pins and needles" sensation in their faces and limbs. Another drawback of injected fentanyl is that its effects last only a half-hour to an hour, compared to four to five hours for heroin.
And then there is the risk of sudden death. "The high potency of fentanyl means that only a minuscule amount (less than 2 mg, the equivalent of two grains of salt) can lead to overdose and death," Brown epidemiologist Brandon Marshall and his co-authors note elsewhere in the same issue of the IJDP. They add that "fentanyl causes rapid and more profound respiratory depression than other opioid analgesics, which significantly narrows the window of opportunity for reversal with naloxone," an opioid antagonist used to treat overdoses. An Australian study found that "the overall risk for fentanyl-related overdose was nearly 4.5 times higher than risk for overdose with other opioids."
Contrary to the accounts of cops and DEA agents, the Rhode Island opioid users interviewed by Carroll and her colleagues did not blithely dismiss this risk. "Participants who were aware of fentanyl universally described it as dangerous and potentially deadly," Carroll et al. write. "People are dropping like flies," one heroin user said. "I don't want to die," said another, explaining why he buys heroin only from a dealer he trusts not to sell him fentanyl-laced powder. Others said they try to avoid fentanyl and take "test hits"—small trial doses—whenever they suspect it is present. "Among illicit opioid users in Rhode Island," Carroll et al. conclude, "known or suspected fentanyl exposure is common, yet demand for fentanyl is low."
Restrictions on painkillers pushed opioid users toward heroin, which was cheaper and more readily available but also more dangerous because of its unpredictable purity. "I used to take just the pills, and then I started doing dope, the heroin, only when I could get it, when it was cheaper," one opioid user told Carroll's team. "But I don't prefer it because you never know what you're getting. It's scary, so I'm more into pills."
She is right to be scared, as University of Calgary toxicologist Scott Lucyk and Lewis Nelson, a professor of emergency medicine at Rutgers, point out:
For prescription drug abusers who are used to using prescription opioids with known constituents and concentrations, the use of heroin with its unpredictable purity and potential for adulteration creates significant problems. Not surprisingly, the risks of death related to prescription opioid misuse compared to heroin use are not the same. In 2014, 10.3 million people used prescription pain relievers non-medically as opposed to 914,000 people who used heroin. Despite a greater than 10-fold difference in number of users, the risk of death from heroin is much greater.
The CDC attributed 18,893 deaths to opioid analgesics in 2014. It attributed 10,574 to heroin, which was used by less than a tenth as many people. By that measure, heroin was more than five time as dangerous.
Ah, well, they were druggies.
As Beletsky and Davis note, "These increases in harm were as predictable as they are disastrous." In fact, they say, "The iatrogenic risk to the health of people who use drugs was not just foreseeable, but in some cases directly foreseen by policymakers." They quote Carrie DeLone, Pennsylvania's former physician general, who recently confessed that "we knew that this was going to be an issue, that we were going to push addicts in a direction that was going to be more deadly." Her justification: "You have to start somewhere."
Beletsky and Davis are rightly appalled by DeLone's attitude, saying, "This statement is emblematic of the belief that decisive action is more important than reducing overall societal harm. While seemingly widespread, this sentiment is inimical to...public health, scientific, and ethical norms." But making drug use more dangerous is arguably one of the ways prohibition works as intended, since it helps scare people away from illegal intoxicants. Conversely, making drug use safer defeats the purpose of prohibition by reducing that deterrent, which is why Maine Gov. Paul LePage vetoed a bill making naloxone more readily available. He complained that "creating a situation where an addict has a heroin needle in one hand and a shot of naloxone in the other produces a sense of normalcy and security around heroin use that serves only to perpetuate the cycle of addiction."
Okay, I think I'm getting my point across too strongly as I'm not actually angry with you or anything so I'm going to actually put that all in spoiler tags for tidyness sake. The point is, this is a form of MAD. And it's endless. Losing perspective, losing history, descending into the vigilante fantasies and murderous rampages continuously, drawing this line of no return we've finally crossed constantly over and over as the media feeds its cycle, that I was "guffawing" at from NeoGAF.com users is infinitely more dangerous, damaging and blinding to any claim we want to make on pursuing progress in our humanity. It's certainly not innocuous.