Lenin’s Tomb
Real pub bore stuff.
soory to say this but when katrina sadly becomes tommorow's news everybody will forget about bush's criminal incompetence....
the victims of katrina stands out as its victims are the worst off in the world's richest economy and the world's richest economy goes and begs for blankets and money from europe and 3rd world countries...
it exposes capitalism, but as always its those middle class academics who will keep bush's incompetence recorded in their writings that makes zilch difference to the beer drinking, football watching, crass celebrity culture of the masses of America. Its the working classes that are usually can be the most xenophobic, bigoted and racist...
BionOc, great post, and thanks for it.
Thx, w.
BionOc
You should have at least linked to some of the stories claiming widespread violence against other people like rape, i.e. taking advantage of others as opposed to defending their own most basic interests.
A lot of media attention has focused on the two rape cases in the Superdome, I personally have not heard of other cases. And these two cases in a place with 20 thousand people, poor people often drug addicts (apparently lots of drug related trash in the lavatories), with mental desease...
Interesting article on this here
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/
n...latimes138.html
Isnt there a few new orleans police up on rape charges.
Anyone got anything more on the report of new orleans police shooting and killing five people near a bridge, near the same bridge that a helicopter has crashed i believe.
I'm thinking the helicopter crash landed with mechanical failure near the bridge and the police took it out on the nearest people around, ie the contractors walking accross the bridge. It's an odd one. No reports of al Qeada, as yet.
Just gotta add this one, a quote from one of the many conflicting reports.
"It was not known why the helicopter was in the area, Smith said."
thanks sonic
I just watched the Shep/Geraldo altercations with the anchors at Fox.
I heard the report that people were being turned back at checkpoints on the bridge.
And that they were not gatting food or water.
(Of course it's Sunday evening now and most - or so we're told - of the people have been sent out of New Orleans.)
BUT, and maybe ya'll have the link....
the Red Cross was told not to come into New Orleans to help because by doing so it would encourage people to stay!
There's a disconnect here somewhere.
Thanks Bionic for your post(s).
If the Bush regime is not fascist, then what is it? We need a new word. New Orleans has been deliberately depopulated. The levees were knowingly neglected, for three whole years, and the money for their upkeep was diverted to Iraq. Those poor, black people are not going back. If the city is reclaimed it will certainly not be reclaimed for them.
Abandoned, left to sink or swim, starved, herded into hell-holes, left to rot while they watched white troops guarding supermarkets where food and water were readily available, shot if they tried to feed their families, then described as insurgents in the Army Times... I very much hope that no one is going to try and explain this, yet again, with "incompetence". And if anyone does, he will deserve to be left starving in his own shit and piss for a week and then interviewed live on TV.
BionOc: Fucking brilliant. Thank you.
Dear BionOc,
that has to be the most ignorant, stupid and utterly hysterical blogpost I've ever read in my entire life. Your argument equates to the arguments used by battered women who desperately try to justify the abuse against them and search for any reason why it must be their fault the abuse is happening.
The idea that some non-existent police brutality, from a police force that is about 70% black due to the state's black governing authorities affirmative action type policies, caused the rapes and the murders, and excuses the disgusting racism that British citizens were subjected to in the super dome and else where in New Orleans and Louisiana, is utterly grotesque in the extreme. It's just patently ridiculous. It's sickening. There are plenty of other areas effected by the hurricane, which are just as poor, where this didn't happen. Why was this?
I'm afraid the reality is this disgraceful behaviour was caused by the culturally liberal and morally bankrupt society that you support - who could ask for a better display of the sloppy ignorant thinking that has brought about this situation than this very ignorant blog-post that casually seeks to justify crimes against humanity. By spouting this gibberish you are disgracefully insulting the decent black people who did decide to rise to the occasion and work together to save lives, and thought it was not a good idea to go around raping, robbing and murdering white people. It's also an insult to the American tax payer who provides a free education for everybody in their country, which is a lot better than most other countries in the Americas manage for their minorities, and don't deserve to be repayed in this way.
I just can't tell you how disgusted I am by your predictable liberal bullshit. The egg's on your face, pal - deal with it. You are the sort of person who thinks gangster rap is just a bit of harmless fun, immigrants shouldn't have to integrate into western society, and minority groups should not be challenged if they spout vicious anti white racism - the precise anti white racism that has caused so much misery in New Orleans. A little humility wouldn't go amiss instead giving us yet another display of the grotesque apologia which only created the problem in the first place.
A little humility wouldn't go amiss
Why do the ranting neo-con trolls keep saying this exact phrase? Or, if they're the same person, doesn't he (because it no doubt is a he) realise that using this exact phrase over and over again kind of gives the game away?
Lets have a bit of reality here: quotes compiled by ABC News
Baron Duncan, describing the time he spent inside the Superdome:
The last few days were utter hell. The stench was unbearable. We were treated like animals. There was shooting, our lives were in danger. A seven-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy got raped.”
Australian woman Kelly-Rae Smith, whose parents are hiding on a road overpass with 40 other tourists after their hotel was flooded:
“The violence is escalating. There are shootings. They have three dead bodies at the bottom of the stairwell where they are.
“They have a pay phone but have to strategically plan when they go.
“There’s so much violence going on even the SWAT team has locked themselves in their building.”
CNN reporter Chris Lawrence, who is holed up with a group on the roof of a police station in the middle of New Orleans:
"Right now it's the only safe place to be in the city. We were on the street earlier but the police said under no circumstances would you be safe on the street."
"They said anybody walking in the streets of New Orleans is basically taking their life in their hands.
"As they hustled us off the street some of the officers told us that groups of young men had been looting the city, shooting at people, attempting to rape young women.
"They directed some of the young women to get off the street immediately."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsi...09/
s1452244.htm
H. Blackrose, how do you know I wasn't impressed with the other guy who said it, and ripped it off him?
If that were true, Gary, then aping another poster's turns of phrase prove that you are exactly the kind of thoughtless "dittohead" as which neo-conservatives are always caricatured, and I'm amazed to find out that the caricature is actually accurate on that point.
However, your response has actually convinced me that you are, in fact, the same people.
BionicOc
great post
Someone elsewhere asked how people in this situation could turn around and hurt their fellow victims. The thing is, people do this all the time. People wo are on the lowest rungs of society's heirarchy pick on those just a rung below them because it gives them a sense of power and confirms for them that at least they are not the lowest of the low. Bullies are much more likely to lash out when they have just been hurt themselves. To me, this helps explain some of the rapes (if they are confirmed). You did a great job of explaining the reaction to "rescuers."
It is only a small number, and, as you say, its not excusable, but it does make a certian amount of sense.
The only reason for wanting to understand why this is happening, would be to try to prevent it from happening the next time. In other words, it assumes a desire to learn.
Surely it's more plausible that rich America doesn't want to learn; it wants to impose power. Therefore it's vital to demonise the working class to justify keeping them down and to excuse never doing anything to support or protect them.
Gary, above, is an example of this -- "BRITISH EMPIRE CITIZENS UNDER SIEGE FROM GANGSTA RAPPERS: WIMPY LIBERALS OPPOSE SHOOT-TO-KILL DEFENSE STRATEGY" pretty much sums the whole thing up in racial terms, although Gary neglects the class angle and the fact that working-class children always smell of sour milk.
However, why should one expect anything else? It is almost merciful that the utter contempt which the US oligarchy shows for those whom it rules is being revealed so clearly. This is sheer Jack London stuff.
w - I definitely think we should not characterise the Bush administration as fascist. It fits no known definition of that term. It has not emerged from a mass fascist movement, does not make a total claim over the behaviour of its citizens, does not produce overt racist propaganda, does not force workers to enlist in a National Union run by the state, does not throw its political opponents into concentration camps etc etc.
It is a deeply reactionary, corrupt and brutal right-wing administration doing its best to shore up American capitalism while fulfilling some of its ideological mandate from the puritanical Right.
Isn't that bad enough?
Pardon me, but the implicit figuration of "young black men" as the perpetrators is kind of dodgy, as is you "I want to understand" condescencion. Forget casting anyone else as a "twittering liberal" - you are having a conversation with yourself.
And it should go without saying, but obviously it needs to be said: before trying to draft a response to the twittering liberals, perhaps a really simple question could be asked and answered:
Are there less rapes, bashings, etc occuring after the devastation or more? (Which is to say: let's leave aside the pretense that rapes, bashings etc are at all exceptional or derive from exceptional circumstances in this instance. That pretense is driving (and legitimating) the militarisation.)
Because without even asking this simple question, the whole attempt to "understand" outbreaks of violence is a conversation that remains pitched to liberals - note the slip mentioned in the first instance - but hardly amounts to an analysis.
Ah, chill out you sanctimonious pillock...
The Two Americas
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 03 September 2005
Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.
What is Cuban President Fidel Castro's secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, "the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go."
"Cuba's leaders go on TV and take charge," said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush's reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, "nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."
"Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable" in Cuba, Valdes said. "Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin."
They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, "so that people aren't reluctant to leave because people might steal their stuff," Valdes observed.
After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction cited Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation. ISDR director Salvano Briceno said, "The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does."
Our federal and local governments had more than ample warning that hurricanes, which are growing in intensity thanks to global warming, could destroy New Orleans. Yet, instead of heeding those warnings, Bush set about to prevent states from controlling global warming, weaken FEMA, and cut the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for levee construction in New Orleans by $71.2 million, a 44 percent reduction.
Bush sent nearly half our National Guard troops and high-water Humvees to fight in an unnecessary war in Iraq. Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Paris in New Orleans, noted a year ago, "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq."
An Editor and Publisher article Wednesday said the Army Corps of Engineers "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the sam
sOmetime3s, agreed; icky condescension, grotesquely unadorned racism, and indeed patronizing assumed possessive entitlement to define and speak for, the whole twittering liberal package. Further, the subject matter is as you say itself beneath contempt, the acceptance of the framework which is a malicious fiction, the infamous Moynahan formula, let us now pompously psychoanalyze the acknowledged "black pathology." Surely the only proper concern for dissidents is the global rape and murder INDUSTRY being run by those collecting the vig here.
Fuck you, alphonse. You with your inverted categories and your Nobody On The Left But Me Understands The Truth persecution complex are hardly in a position to define racism, or anything else of import.
I won't be engaging in one of your endless tiresome flame wars; this is my only communication on the matter. But I will not be called racist by the likes of you.
Jesus fucking Christ, where the fuck is all of this sanctimony coming from?
Alphonse, has someone sucked your estimable brain out through a tube?
Ah yes Gary. Basically the problem is liberals and black people. Anyone can see that.
Yeah. Chill out. Don't think. Lenin's tomb is right.
s0metim3s, your point about comparative violence rates before and after is a really good one; do you have any data on it?
But that tired old stick that race experience is a black box and any attempt to discuss it, however constructively, is always-already racist? That's not only invalid, it's actively counterproductive. What's the alternative? Sitting monadically in our individual race realities and letting the real racists get on with their depradations? That may be enough for you, but not me.
I think there is some point to questioning whether or not these represent unusually high levels of violence or whether this violence is suddenly under the spotlight. I don't understand the vehmenance with which people made the point though. I think its also true that we don't know the full story of this violence. Interestingly in the stadium there were conflicting reports on this and a number of journalists on the spot were concerned to talk about the very strong community networks which continued functioning against the backdrop of a relatively small group of people involved in 'violence'. But things get complicated here. BionOc already made the point about the stone racists of the New Orleans police force (and we've SEEN the national guard in action). The phrase 'looting' is similarly flexible. China's point about the looters as hero's is an important one. Also when people have lost everything they may well take more then food. They have to think about what they're going to do when the food runs out. But aside from that, no doubt horrible things were happening. But horrible things happen everyday. And many people do live in fear day to day in a brutalised society. The ironic thing about the Hobbist fantasy percieved as something below the surface of an ordered society is that we live in institutionalized hobbism. People make day to day efforts to protect themselves against this. Those day to day efforts are destroyed in a situation like this. The middle class fantasy of the apocalypse is everyday life for many.
But no, being oppressed does'nt make you nice. Thats the really patronising idea.
Link to Nazi site deleted.
Len, would you please ban this racist and pull down its links?
Oh Lenin, purlease.
Here's Ishmael Reed on tnis genre you have here on your blog, mass psychoanalyzing black people in connection with violent crimes:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/198...20/
19891120reed
Can you point to the psycoanalytic explanation here at Lenin's Tomb of the "white" crimes in NO and what whiteness has to do with it?
Alphonse - no, you purlease. I'm afraid I find this infantile nit-picking rather worrying coming as it does from an intelligent and generally charming person.
The article does not offer a mass psychoanalysis of black people. It does react to the racist vilification of black people in the press, and therefore addresses the context to 'black' crime - racism, oppression, poverty, police brutality, all that. There is no way that discussing and acknowledging this amounts to essentialising black people as you insist. This is petty, niggling bullshit and I think it should stop.
lenin x
"infantile nit-picking"
Okay so you are saying that 1. the rapes and murders in NO are being committed by black folks disproportionately to white folks and to what happens in normal conditions. Thus the violence of 'young black men' requires and justifies an otherwise needless explanation, 'a fucking analysis,' which of course BionicOc is qualified to give on behalf of the murderers and rapists who are all evidently black folks, young black men, of course. This fucking analysis is well known in America and it is called "black pathology". Its purpose is to 'explain' why black folks are so violent, '(that is, to propagate the lie that black folks are violent, especially. Also there is a pathology for the black family.)
and the result of this fucking analysis, its explicit centerpiece, ('black rage' it was briefly pathologized as after the LA riots) is that 2. black folks are violent, especially, because they are black. Because of how it is to be black, this drives black folks to rape and murder. There is then a split, once it is established that black folks are especially violent and therefore 'black violence' needs mass sociological explanation and is a problem, between right and left of this fucking analysis. The right says it's genetic. The left says it's cultural and the result of racism making people insane. The left, associated with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, says we can sympathetically +understand+ this, how being black will drive someone to rape and murder, and though yes racism is stressful, and we can't blame them, the result is violent black folks. Black folks 'we made.' Scary black folks, we 'made them' and the conclusion - we need to unmake them somehow - is left to be inferred.
No data of course; that would screw everything up. Just the assumption of violent black folks as a special problem requiring sociology. The actual killing in NO is wildly disproportionately committed by other than black folks, but these killers are not fungible and one can't make wards of them, speak for them and explain them en masse. Black folks have the special black pathology than makes them rape and kill, and pronouncing on this pathology - problematizing it - is something white folks love to do. Everyone else is an individual case.
Nit picking? For pity's sake. This is a pernicious and much revered American ideology.
What's wrong with this?:
"You take, for example, a bunch of young, impoverished black men who've spent their lives receiving the message from all sides that society values them approximately as much as dirt. Who've grown up learning the intricacies of brutality direct from the most corrupt, vicious police force you could hope to run for your life from down a back alley in the Ninth Ward. Then you put them in a situation where society finally just comes right out and says, 'Hey yo, dirt! FUCK YOU! Stay there and die!' Where the official instructions are 'Go to this central location and
Where the official instructions are 'Go to this central location and wait days for nonexistent buses without food, water or support of any kind, in conditions of unimaginable, inhuman hellishness, while your grandmother and your baby son die together in a wheelchair next to you.' Where food and water manifestly exist, within arm's and a baseball bat's reach, and they've been told--by those same instructive cops--they'll be jailed or worse, zero-tolerance, if they try to get some for their families and friends.
And you're surprised when they go mental?"
What's wrong is they don't. They don't go mental. They live difficult, arduous lives, work hard, and obey the law, like everyone else, with neglible exceptions.
Bloody fucking Christ. Okay, a few corrections. The argument as I read it does not include the assumption that the rapes and murders in NO are disportationately black-on-white. It addresses the claim that a small number of crimes are being committed, and that most of these are being committed by young black men in a mostly black area. It makes no stipulation about who the victims are. Go ahead and look for a comment that does so.
In addressing this, the post remarks that the residents have been treated like shit - not just now, but from day one - and that the frequent result of people being treated like shit is that they become criminals. This happens to be a banal sociological fact - yet, you insist on reading something sinisterly racist into it by misconstruing what is being said.
The suggestion that there is any point in the article where it stipulates that blacks are especially violent because they are black is perfectly absurd. It says this precisely nowhere. It implies it nowhere. It adverts to no such thing.
I consider this whole diatribe on your part a shocking Hitchens-esque dive into absurdity and calumny. Cut it out.
"black-on-white"
misreading, my fault. balcks are presumed to be committing crimes more than whites are. I meant that, without any evidence, the exemplary rapist-murderer is a 'young black man.' A type. Treated as a type, with sweeping generalizations.
"that most of these are being committed by young black men in a mostly black area"
Young black men? How young? What's the average age? Nobody knows. But the image needs him young. This is the return of the 'superpredator' our society 'made.'
"shit is that they become criminals"
Not black folks especially, and not people treated like shit especially. George Bush hasn't been treated like shit; he's the major murderer here.
"The suggestion that there is any point in the article where it stipulates that blacks are especially violent because they are black is perfectly absurd. It says this precisely nowhere"
On the contrary:
"You take, for example, a bunch of young, impoverished black men who've spent their lives receiving the message from all sides that society values them approximately as much as dirt"
It doesn't say you take a bunch of people, but young BLACK men, and then it says their lives have made them violent. This is not true of young black men. They are not violent. They are in shit, yes, but despite their lives, they are not any more violent than young white men. There is no correlation between being young and black and rape and murder, and this is the correllation drawn here explicitly. The rape and murder is being explained in terms of the 'typical' experience of being young and black. Being young and black and poor is turning people into rapists and murderers, that is the proposition. Beyond the presumption of such a general proposition - the key to racist thinking - it's not sustainable with facts. There are non racial factors offering better explanations of what makes people rape and murder; being black IS NOT A FACTOR. "Take a bunch of men wo had been sexually abused as children..." for example. This would begin to be an 'analysis.' The portrait drawn here is of a 'typical' young black man in NO subjected to this nightmare, and subjected to the racism of the state, becomming a rapist as a result (not a 'looter' but a rapist and a murderer). It's speculative. It's distorted. And vile.
Just imagine you read that paragraph on the BBC website. Perhaps it would say 'young Arab men.' And it went into the typical drill, how young Arab men become terrorists. You would notice it, surely. You already have.
"It addresses the claim that a small number of crimes are being committed, and that most of these are being committed by young black men in a mostly black area"
Not addresses. Accepts. As only nachrill.
AND it +asserts+ that young black men who experienced the trauma of watching grandmother or baby die reacted by raping someone. Evidence for even one such case? But of course The Young Black Man experiences everything as a horde. The Young Black Man experiences greif like no other being. One suffered the most heinous trauma, another committed a crime, but its all in the Young Black Man 'on the loose' family.
This is fucking barmy. Sorry, Alphonse, you've totally lost my sympathy with this.
You're ferretting out meanings that aren't there. Arguably, some parts of the post could have been phrased better, but I won't even get into that with you since you aren't arguing in good faith. I'm simply not continuing this.
I'm sorry you feel that way Lenin and sorrier to see this on your blog. Because it is truly offensive.
I bet you wouldn't read that post aloud verbatim in a room full of black folks. I have a feeling there aren't many here at the Tomb.
Lenin - take the statement beginning
'And you know, it's really not that hard. You take, for example, a bunch of young, impoverished black men..'
remove the word 'black' - what real difference does it make? why is it there?
It highlights the fact that impoverishment is not colour blind in the US. The urban poor of New Orleans are predominantly black. And the reason for this is the endemic and vicious racism of US society. I don't see how pointing this out makes one an "essentialist", quite the opposite I'd have thought.
lenin: I don't agree with alphonse's criticisms, but neither do I think they are being made in bad faith.
I have lost count of the number of times that I have highlighted what I considered to be racist presumptions only to be told that I am "ferretting out meanings that aren't there". The issue she highlights is a serious one and deserves to be taken seriously.
"I don't see how pointing this out makes one an "essentialist", quite the opposite I'd have thought."
The thing is, the post begins with unconfirmed reports. And then it posits the criminals reponsible as young and black and male. And then it psychoanalyzes them en masse and renders those who suffered the most vicious abuse suspects in murder and rape. BECAUSE BY SINGLING OUT YOUNG BLACK MEN, it implies young black men are indeed guilty of these unconfirmed crimes and it clears everyone else, including the middle agend white racists raping and murdering them, AS USUAL, in NO.
And it says that YOUNG BLACK MEN WENT MENTAL, became crazed in these circumstances, because young and black (while others presumably remained sane) and preyed on their fellows. ITS NOT TRUE. They were slaughtered. Innocent men doing just what +you+ would do were slaughtered. And the body count will show a lot of young black men shot dead. And lynched. And Bionic Oc has provided the explanation - they 'went mental', they were 'on the loose', rampaging, these young black men, they lost their minds. It's said all the time, about Congo, about Haiti, its never true. It is a malicious lie.
Roy - I think the presence of the word 'black' owes itself to the ubiquitously racist coverage in the media. I think the point of the post, and this is what I'm arguing with Alphonse too, is that even if the stories are true in essentials, it demands more than slogans about 'Anarchy' etc. It is suggesting that crime is the product of social conditions, not of anything essential to black people.
The fact that the post begins with reports from the media which are undoubtedly sensationalist doesn't mean that the author of the post accepts the veracity of these reports - it is entirely an Even If point that is being made.
Well, some did and some didn't, BionOc. (Any relation to Doc, BTW?? Ha!)
But - yeah. It looks like some welcomed the appearance of the National Guard... and others didn't. Myself, if *I* were a black American, I'd be.... cautious! (Remember Selma! Your country's servicemen are not necessarily your friends.) Depends what they start breaking out. If it's water and supplies, that's good. It's a "Berlin" situation. If it's just guns and no water or supplies... that's bad. That's Iraq!
So that's why I think you got some hesitant cheers from those black women to the troops... when they saw the water and so on.
(These knucklehead soldiers SHOULD have let the Red Cross in two days before, mind you! They and their "order"... the perennial fascination of authority! If the Red Cross were willing to go in, in they should have been allowed to go.)
Did you read all those blog entries and comments by "just reg'lar Americans" going on about shooting looters and which were the right ones to shoot, BTW? THAT was what got me worried, rather than a lot of "middle-class liberals" worrying about "rising to the occasion". (As I said, some did! Some 'looters' gave away most of their lootings to the less able-bodied, and lots of people on Canal Street actually helped each other, not robbed each other. Cooked communal meals, etc. It really was "just a few bad apples" as my primary school teacher used to say!)
But some nitwit said to his blog pals the following, which I shall paraphrase: "If you see someone looting something you know he shouldn't have, don't shoot him, shoot the STUFF! A TV with a bullet through it ain't gonna be much good!"
Yeah - that's *really* what you want over there - a lot of moralistic snipers pinging away from rooftops! Trying to hit people's televisions and hitting them in the noggins.
(I tell you what, if I was over there, I think a battery-operated mini TV would be a priority for me! So that I could listen to the ridiculous politicians while I fed my baby on looted formula. Maybe more died than necessary because they were TOO honest and didn't loot ENOUGH. Insurance will pay back all the businesses anyway - it's private people usually who don't have the luxury of that. I would have rather a lot of "fun" picking things out!!)
They did HAVE one sniper, at least, in NO... he was somewhere outside the hospital! (I presume I am ALLOWED to "trust" this account, as doctors and nurses gave it to reporters.) Nice.
This is a fine discussion. One thing I'd like to note is that there's a slip in something Lenin said - from "the frequent result of people being treated like shit is that they become criminals" to "crime is the product of social conditions". The former is vague in terms of causality - sometimes (how often?) people do something in response to this other thing. The latter implies a causal link: social conditions produces crime. This seems like an automatic process how it's phrase here (people plus getting fucked over equals crime). I'm not sure if this is how the point was intended but that's how I took it. But, if people who are treated like shit only 'become criminals' frequently, then the same social relations also produce things other than crime (people plus getting fucked over equals who knows what). So, the claims linking people who are criminals to shitty treatment are an after-the-fact story, not a causal and predictive story. It's not at all clear what use this story has (nor, as Alphonse has eloquently argued, is there any positive use to including blackness in the story).
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