Couple of quizzes to keep you entertained. There are no real rules; I will post the answers after a suitable period of time. Discussion is permitted.
Cwiz 1: Prisons
1. In which novel did Edmond Nantes escape from the Chateau d’If?
2. In which prison was the Marquis de Sade incarcerated?
3. Which South African prison was named after the Afrikaans word for seal?
4. Which Cavalier poet wrote, “Stone walls do not a prison make”?
5. Which US prison took its name from pelicans?
6. Who wrote
I never saw a man who looked,
With such a wistful eye,
Upon that little tent of blue,
Which prisoners call the sky.
7. Tartarus was a dungeon in Greek myth; for whom was it built?
8. Frank Darabont directed which prison movie?
9. Which isolated UK prison opened in 1809 to house Napoleonic War prisoners?
10. In 1952, the Kray twins were held in which historic prison?
This cwiz is courtesy of ProfessorPineapple
Cwiz 2: Scrambled Plays
1. Forgoing toadwit
2. Meth cab
3. Née in lewd farmyards
4. Limp agony
5. Anal seas fathomed
6. Sex up or die
7. A Leo knocking bar
8. See earthling games
9. I scorn hero
10. Sole had soul
Ovally Balls 
Run The Jewels shouldn’t be my thing. But they definitely are based off the album Refit mentioned the other day.
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‘I’m absolutely behind reform, but defunding seems stupid.’
Thought it was a bit odd at first, but think think the idea is to spend less on the entire militarised enforcement edifice of policing and divert to other programmes to address root causes of crime etc.
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Chimpie – so not defund completely.
Maybe the need to get rid a few of the forces they have (DEA or another) and focus on community policing and rehabilitation.
See also reducing sentencing across the board and abandoning the war on drugs completely. But that is opposed by the fairly powerful prison officer unions (among others) in the USA who have traditionally opposed this.
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The Washington Post has a good explanation of what “defund the police” actually means (very much what Chimpie said above):
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It’s all a bit Eisenhower Military-Indeustrial complex.
The city PDs get eye-watering amounts of cash. These figures are from 2017:
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NYC’s police budget is over 6 billion dollars a year now. De Blasio’s said he’s going to send some of it the way of social and youth services.
Verso books have got a free download at the moment that is worth a look:
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2817-the-end-of-policing
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Happy Anniversary to the BB’s! Hope you’re having a wonderful evening!
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I’m very conflicted about abandoning the war on drugs completely. I think it depends entirely on the society you’re in. I don’t think the States is mature enough to have this in place. South Africa certainly isn’t. May work in stable, emotionally and politically mature places like the Netherlands, but here it would be a disaster. Also, I’ve seen 1st hand what hard drugs do to people and it’s horrific.
What about booze? Can’t argue that one, except that it’s been a part of most cultures for centuries, which means fuck all other than it’s been a part of cultures for centuries. Also probably easier to make at home than coke or crystal meth. Everyone in SA made versions of ‘beer’ or ‘cider’ recently when booze was banned, but haven’t heard of a large rise in drugs labs.
Just to reiterate, drugs are fucking awful. I personally wouldn’t unban them or stop trying to destroy their production and distribution, but maybe someone has an alternative solution that works?
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We’re at covid level 1 from today, which means life is essentially back to normal, theres been no community transmission for a month and if 30,000 people decide they want to go to super rugby they can. Good effort, considering that in the early days of lockdown we were tracking slightly worse than Italy. Of course, the drawbridge is still up to keep the rest of you diseased fuckers out. People might think twice before casting a protest vote for the joke candidate now.
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Deebs – I agree with you that there are some banned substances that are utterly horrific but have you ever read any of what Professor Nutt (real name) has said? He used to be the UK goverments advisor on drugs and was asked to decide the social harm each class of drug does as a way of supporting government policy. He ended up ranking booze the highest above heroin because of the harm it’s consumption does at a societal level. Mushrooms were ranked last and are still a class A drug in the UK. Then he got fired.
My point being that there appears to be no real logic behind the policies. At least in the UK.
My other qustions whether making them illegal and with high penalties for possession actually stops people from doing them. It clearly doesn’t, and there are lessons from Prohibition in the US which haven’t been learned (i.e. If they are illegal people will commit crimes to get them and it just fuels a black market and the utter synts behind it). I just don’t think banning them works or helps.
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Re those police figures, I’m not really sure what is a high figure but it doesn’t seem too ridiculous… The Metropolitan Police in London is £3.56bn in 2019/20 for example….
https://www.statista.com/statistics/864491/london-police-budget-size/
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Can’t disagree on the harm that serious drugs do, however, as craigs pointed out alcohol does huge damage and is legal.
The ‘war on drugs’ is sure as hell not working and has never worked, another approach can’t hurt at this stage. Legalise, tax & regulate. Any approach that pushes the organised crime elements to the fringes has to help.
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Wasn’t the whole alcohol vs cannabis thing (as ever) political back in the day? The booze lobby managed to get weed & other drugz banned. My memories are vague on this, I could be wrong.
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I’m sure someone will along to fact me soon.
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Memories vague because of the weed or the alcohol?
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Wish I could FACTBOMB you Chimpie, but I can’t. What i would question is Prof Nutt’s assertions – what percentage of the populace regularly consumes alcohol versus hard drugs? If booze was banned and the ban largely enforced, would people simply stop looking for recreational escapes, or would they go to weed only, or possibly a bit of acid or Ecstasy or coke or crystal meth?
Absolutely agree on the need to try to break the underworld, but I don’t know if legalisation of drugs is the answer. As I say, different approaches in different countries. Lifting the booze ban here last week has seen a surge in road fatalities, hospitalisations due to booze-fuelled violence, accidents etc etc. One provincial government has already called for the ban to be reintroduced* and two of the top medics in the country said in separate interviews on radio this morning that South Africans are not responsible enough with booze. Fucking childish is how I would put it. Me included.
* Happens to be one of the most corrupt provinces that has done sweet fuck all in 73 days of lockdown to ensure that hospitals and clinics are adequately equipped to deal with the expected surge in Covid admissions as winter takes a grip on the country. They did manage to appoint a provincial HOD’s daughter’s luxury lodge as a COVID quarantine place. Said daughter is 26 and has ‘owned’ the lodge for 6 years. No evidence of how she acquired it at such a young age. Mother’s salary – large and undeserved as it is – would not have covered it either in that period.
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Criags, it was as much about the percentage of the budget that goes on the police.
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Deebs – he wrote a whole paper and shit. I read it about 8 years ago and and will try to find it.
Completely changed my view, especially after he got fired. There’s a few ways to look at this though. The simple argument about whether fully grown people should be punished for putting crap into their bodies. Well, sugar is addictive and consumed at far too high levels to be healthy. It’s not even taxed and diabetes kills a gazillion peeps a year. So I don’t think this holds up but selling drugs to kids is obviously wrong. No more donuts for my kids.
Re the harm it does to others and society. You just mentioned drink driving so it’s a tad hypocritical to allow alcohol but not anything else. Further, as Mr Nutt said, alcohol does the most harm. I don’t think most people would take heroine if it was legal. Unless you’re in a hospital and they give you some similar to kill the pain. Like morphine, which is where heroine comes from.
Re the associated crime. Just take away the incentive. If drugs are legalised then there is no black market for synts to profit off. See also the mob during prohibition. Buying weed from a shop in the USA was a far more civilised experience than a shady transaction in a car (or so I’ve heard).
So why are they illegal in the first place? Prof Nutt has written about this too.
The truth is unpalatable and goes back to the period of alcohol prohibition in the US in the 1920s. This was introduced as a harm-reduction measure because alcohol was seen (correctly) as a drug that seriously damaged families and children. But public demand for alcohol in the US did not abate and this fuelled a massive rise in bootleg alcohol and underground bars (known as speakeasys) that encouraged the rise of the mafia and other crime syndicates.
To combat this, the US government set up a special army of enforcers, under the command of Harry Anslinger, which became known as “the untouchables”. This army of enforcers was widely celebrated by the newspapers and the acclaim propelled Anslinger to national prominence. However, when public disquiet at the crime and social damage caused by alcohol prohibition led to its repeal, Anslinger saw his position as being in danger.
To enable him to keep his army of drug enforcers, he created a new drug threat: cannabis, which he called marijuana to make it sound more Mexican. Working with a newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, he created hysteria around the impact of cannabis on American youth and proclaimed an invasion of marijuana-smoking Mexican men assaulting white women. The ensuing public anxiety led to the drug being banned. The US then imposed its anti-cannabis stance on other western countries and this was finally imposed on the rest of the world through the first UN convention on narcotic drugs in 1961.
This process of vilifying drugs by engendering a fear of the “other people” who use them became a recurring theme in drug policy. Black Americans were stigmatised on account of heroin use in the 1950s. In the 1960s hippies and psychedelics were targeted because they opposed the Vietnam war. In the 1970s it was again inner-city black Americans who used crack cocaine who received the brunt of opprobrium, so much so that the penalties for crack possession were 100 times higher than those for powder cocaine, despite almost equivalent pharmacology. Then came “crystal” (methamphetamine) and the targeting of “poor whites”.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/28/why-are-drugs-illegal-google-answer
Please don’t take this as advocacy, I am pretty naive about actually taking drugs. The only illegal substances I’ve taken are weed, mushrooms and the mdma my brother put in my beer at his stag do. But it’s a bugbear of mine because it makes no sense and there’s so much fear and bullshit surrounding the subject. It’s hard to actually talk to anyone about it.
Unless there’s something that I am missing.
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Tomp – the weird thing about that is that the city that spends the most is the lowest % which implies that the general fund of those cities far is smaller. Maybe the general fund needs an increase too. It’s not a binary choice.
I’d be interested to see what the expenditure is per resident for example. Which I can work out at lunch.
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Chimpie, the criminalisation of drugs? In the UK there was no great problem in terms of until after the introduction of the Misuse of Drugs Act in the 1970s. Earlier restrictions were because of fear about soldiers using drugs in WWI and then control of women and foreigners after WWI. In America definitely a very very racialised solution to the the drugs problem.
Very unclear how it works in other countries – Portugal seems interesting and here in the Czech Republic the law is relatively liberal on the matter. However, there are still social costs and the effectiveness of the Portugese policy is contested.
I have taken illegal drugs, though not for over a decade and never when posting on AoD or OB, and can see a case for loosening restrictions. Part of the initial thrill was it was something illicit, but I did quite enjoy smoking weed with friends. There was a really strange period around 2004ish when buying/selling mushrooms was legal (or maybe not illegal) in the UK. I used to buy a bag every other Friday from a bloke with a stand near Covent Garden, where I was working at the time.
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Tomp – the reason for not being able to buy mushrooms is perhaps the stupidest. You might pick a poisonous one. Right, so because numpties can’t forage we’ll ban the sale of them.
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Ah, you got there first, craigs. Anslinger was a very dodgy bloke. Mexican (and Canadian) bootleggers shifted a load of bootleg booze over the border and so the routes were already in place for dope and heroin to go through afterwards.
Drugs are a really interesting way of seeing how things work. Your boys at HSBC also helped by laundering a load of El Chapo and the Sinaloa Cartel’s money at the other end.
I listened to this last week. It’s very good on the developmont of anti-drugs measures in Mexico and the USA. The second guy talks a lot about the media representations in 1950s California and there’s a lot of hip jive talk in that section:
[audio src="https://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/uscentre/20180223_rethinkingTheOriginsOfTheDrugWarInMexico.mp3" /]
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richmedia.lse.ac.uk/uscentre/20180223_rethinkingTheOriginsOfTheDrugWarInMexico.mp3
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Criags, a friend of mine used to grow his own at home. It was really really easy. He bought a kit and a few weeks later away he went. They weren’t very strong but quite pleasant.
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Tomp – ‘friend’ eh?
Well a friend of mine did the same thing. It’s perfectly legal to buy the spores for research purposes.
I’ll listen to the thing at lunch too.
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You used to be able to get black peas on Oldham Market.
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Hsbc has a errr interesting history. There is a guy who’s job description is HSBC Historian. I’m sure he will be happy talk about that.
Not the most compromised company I’ve worked for. The Swiss banks take that award easily.
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Just to add the appalling loss of life in Mexico due to the drug war. Truly horrendous.
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I’d imagine they started out with a bit of opium dealing in 19th Century China.
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Tomp – listening to the presentation linked. It’s interesting how much of the policies (including Mexico) are supported by the demonisation of minorities. I. E. The Chinese opium smokers in Mexico in the early 20th century.
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There’s a brilliant bit later on where one of them says that generally US police weren’t corrupt in the sense of talking money under the table. They were too busy banging up African-Americans and other groups to worry about that.
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‘So-called “boogaloo bois” are members of a loose-knit, pro-gun, anti-government movement, which is preoccupied with what they believe to be a looming second American civil war. ‘
I’m losing track of these US anti-government and gun – nut factions. There are so many.
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Earlier this week they were talking about boogaloo on something I subscribe to. There were a couple of links that I liked:
https://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2020/02/word-of-the-week-boogaloo.html
and this one about Electric Boogaloo as a snowclone:
https://blog.oup.com/2007/08/patterns/
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Ah, wrong one.
This should be the one:
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So I had a look at those figures and added population and police killings between 2013 and 2019 (sourced from mappoliceviolence.org). There doesn’t appear to be any correlation between police budget per person and the number of killings per person but there appears to be a weak negative correlation between % of the general fund expenditure and killings per person. I.e. A lower % leads to more killings.
I’d like to point out that the cities above are a bit random so it would be worth doing this over all the cities in the USA and by state etc. OT will probably castigate me for showing nothing so have at it and I wish FD was here too.
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Unless there’s something that I am missing.
No, I don’t think so: I think it really does depend on the country and society you’re living in. Relaxing weed controls here has simply brought it into the open, but government doesn’t get much from it because it’s largely ‘artisanal’ in nature. Most of the meth trade is similarly back street and I don’t think it would be regulated in SA to any great degree – we’re just not that kind of society. As I say, in more mature societies, with better policed environments and less corruption, perhaps you can look at legalisation to a degree, but not in SA and not in many other developing countries.
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Deebs – I agree with you that the right framework is needed. Supporting addicts for example. The Swiss got that right.
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I know I watched the Blues Brothers a wee while ago, and I said that I didn’t think it was as funny as I remember it (and that the car chase was too long), but that the music was fantastic. Don’t think I misread the film as badly as this articles does though…..
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jun/09/ive-never-seen-the-blues-brothers
It’s almost as though he misses the point of the film completely (and gets bits wrong, like the Brothers driving through spectators at a Nazi Rally – they don’t, they drive through the Nazis causing them to jump off the bridge). Think there was a fair bit of shoe-horning going on. Shame, ’cause Michael Hann has written some good stuff on music at times.
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Step aside Squidge, there’s a new sheriff in town:
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Oops:
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And again!!!
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Possibly the same BBC person who was responsible for putting together the piece about Kobe Bryant in January:
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Poirot retires from international duty at age 27
‘Poirot, who plays for Bordeaux-Begles, added: “I feel my motivation is not at its maximum.
“I always promised myself I would be at 100% when playing for France, to not lie. Les Bleus, it’s the Holy Grail. I can’t go and play for them and just take my cap and my bonus.”‘
Shame. Good player.
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That’s a Jaffer, son.
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Naw, This is a a Jaffa…..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes
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I’ll just leave this here:
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Thanks Tomp.
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Well, I counted two legal tackles out of 57* in that clip. One when he was too late to stop the drop (so was that late in that case?) and another one that was borderline spear late in the clip, but legal. For the rest, he either gets bounced out the way because he’s not committed to a proper tackle, or he goes high and illegal, no arms or clothesline.
Move over Chris Ashton, we’ve found true evil here!
*Didn’t actually count, TomP, to save you having to go back and check.
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