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fishwax

fishwax's Journal
fishwax's Journal
August 15, 2014

The Wire's Bunny Colvin helps explain how we got here: "This drug thing, this ain't police work"

This drug thing, this ain't police work. No, it ain't. I mean, I can send any fool with a badge and a gun up on them corners and jack a crew and grab vials. But policing? I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everybody gonna be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on cuffs, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon the neighborhood that you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory.


Bunny Colvin's speech--one of the best moments in the five great seasons of The Wire--has been running through my head the last couple of days, watching things flare up in Ferguson. There has been much discussion of the militarization of the police and what brought it about, and certainly the war on drugs (a war which has always been waged disproportionately against communities of color) is a major factor.

The clip
August 14, 2014

"When cops declare open season on journalists ..."

"When cops declare open season on journalists, when they feel free to declare any scene of "unlawful protest" a free fire zone, that will be a very ugly day - and not just for journalists."

---Hunter S. Thompson, "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan"

Of course, things were very ugly in Ferguson long before they started arresting journalists. But that quote comes to mind tonight, as the situation in Ferguson continues to

("Strange Rumblings in Aztlan" is an article he wrote for Rolling Stone about the death of journalist Ruben Salazar, who was killed by a wall-piercing tear gas canister fired by a deputy of the LA County Sheriff's Department during the Chicano Moratorium march against the Vietnam War.)

January 3, 2014

Nick Saban's Worst Nightmare -- Bob Stoops and the Oklahoma Sooners troll the Tide in New Orleans

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/10236203/oklahoma-beats-alabama-sugar-bowl

Stoops, though — can we give the man a pirate ship? Oklahoma's plan to stop the no. 3 Crimson Tide was so DNGAF it could have been its own 2008 subreddit. I realize this word gets overused on the Internet, but I was there in the Superdome, and what the Sooners did was just exquisite, exquisite trolling. Some football games are shootouts and some are chess matches; this was like watching a commenter ruin a blogger's day over and over again. The blogger keeps getting madder, because when you care enough to run a basic spell-check (= try to establish the running game) you shouldn't have to answer to some dude called pants_commander who has no respect for the shift key (= busts out an onside kick while leading by 14 with one minute left). But if the enduring image of Bama from this game was — apologies to AJ McCarron, who has many lovely trophies at his house — freshman running back Derrick Henry hog-plowing through the Oklahoma defense in the second half, the enduring image of Oklahoma was that ridiculous double–middle finger of a game-icing kick. It was probably an accident, which somehow made it more, not less, insulting. It was as though Stoops had partied so hard on the corpse of the SEC that he woke up with an unplanned tattoo.

Because Big Game Bob has, of course, invested important time over the last couple of seasons in airing some very vibrant emotions about the SEC and its dominance and its defenses. And while these were by letter narrowly confined to a critique of the media's tendency to ascribe depth to conferences that are merely very strong up top, they were in spirit nothing else but calling out Alabama, and Stoops knew this and still knows it. The word "propaganda" was deployed in an unkind spirit. And most of the country, including me, certainly, and also Vegas, which made the Sooners a 15-point underdog, saw this Sugar Bowl matchup as an opportunity for the Tide to exact bloody retribution — against Stoops for disrespecting them, against Auburn for dumping them out to New Orleans in the first place, against the kicking game for having the temerity to exist. Instead, infant quarterback Trevor Knight, who wasn't even a lock to start for Oklahoma, threw four touchdown passes, Alabama gave up 31 points in the first half after having surrendered a total of 52 first-half points in its previous 12 games, and Stoops blazed a fat chain of told-you-so doughnuts all over our national parking lot. He must have known he'd be on camera a lot, because he wore his nicest visor.

Afterward, a bunch of Oklahoma players piled onto a stage and broke ESPN. Did I mention that this game was amusing?

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