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Discouraged by the rather stormtrooper black and white decor of the Calgary Police Force's vehicles, a mirror of their US counterparts, it occurs to me that what if we conducted a small social experiment...???
There's some precedent for this - In the early 1970's Professor Philip G. Zimbardo conducted what would become later known as the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which he probed how ordinary people would act when outfitted with the trappings and privileges of authority and helplessness. It revealed the rather dismal results of conformity to "social" expectations and roles.
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In lieu of the Black and White police vehicles we have now, which are designed, I suspect, not just to be readily identifiable but as well to somewhat intimidate future "victims" of the Justice system, and arguably the black and white coloring is too often mirrored in the black and white thinking of members of the force (when was the last time you witnessed a police officer using discretion?), I'd suggest a few changes.
Beginning with the Motto...IN the US (on Television at least), it's "To Serve and Protect". (well, no, it isn't, but we'll pretend and you can do your own research there...). In Calgary it's "Vigilance • Courage • Pride". Taking Issue with all of the above - Vigilance - too similar to vigilante, think the burning crosses of the KKK, we should all be vigilant of the rights and privileges we give the police. This should be our motto, not theirs. And "Vigilance" is nothing if you're every sense and intuition is misinformed. "Courage". Well, let's be real, "Courage" is an easy virtue when you've been outfitted with tasers, nightsticks, handguns, Kevlar Vests and a trigger happy partner. Give me all of the above and we'll go head to head and see who has courage...and no you calling for backup...
And finally..."Pride", The first of the 7 deadly sins. Nope, I, as a member of the public that pays your salary, am not even remotely interested in endorsing this. Not a bit, not even a whit...
Here's a few alternate mottos that give me about the same sense of security. "Coercive • Judgemental • Above the Law". Or: "Well Armed • Well Equipped • By You".
We are aiding the instruments of our own destruction...
Here are some new mottos: "Love • Harmony • Agreement" or "Friendly • Helpful • Paid For by You" or "Nurture • Encourage • Assist" or "Caring • Attentive • Supportive". Even with these few short words we're developing a completely different imaginings of the police. Now lets re-imagine their cars. Instead of the Black and White Imperial Cruisers they now patrol with, how's about floral VW bugs, or color schemes based upon pink and purple. What kind of policing would these cars face, and what kind of officers would they attract to the force, and more importantly, what kind of reaction would they generate from the public that required their assistance? I'm thinking criminals might feel a lot less criminal, and we might be getting a little closer to the grey and colored world you find when you drop all absolutes...
And the uniforms, lets get away from the black (I know, it hides the blood well), but lets try, an experiment, some more real, hippy, floral patterns. Why not? Try it out, we've nothing to lose...
There's a world of change in tiny details...
And other tiny details, too, like you can't shoot anyone you haven't hugged first, and if you haven't hugged them, they're too dangerous and crazy, well, too bad, that's what we pay you for. Lets get away from the polarities and realize the nuances of people, and hire the police on the same basis. Knowing you have to be hugged first will probably make you a lot less likely to shoot someone trying to hug you. It's easy to shoot someone trying to kill you.
Watch policing change and see what happens to crime. Hire cops that don't see the world in black and white and give them back the power of discretion and see how we can change the world...
Crazy Ideas. Maybe they'll work, maybe they won't, but surely they're worth the experiment...
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"Adam Ruins Everything" explains how corporations have seized and monopolized the right to public domain artworks. Well. And maybe you guessed who the culprit is?
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The evolution and aggregation of power is a curious thing.
One can imagine our earliest ancestors - primates, monkeys-ish, ape-ish, power would have belonged to the strongest member of the troop or tribe.
We don't have to imagine too hard, we have plenty of living cousins to examine.
And in the earlier days of our evolution, if you chose to challenge power, you won or you lost. If you won, well, you were now power. And if you lost you were banished from the tribe, or you bowed before it's rules.
Power could never be too abused, if it were then two, three, a dozen members of the tribe together could overthrow it. We figured that out pretty early I'm guessing, shortly into the development of language.
Now power in the troop organized to prevent power from other troops and tribes usurping, The strong united to protect the tribe against the threat of other animals and tribes and troops of monkeys, and so it goes, perhaps for a million years, until we evolved into the first proto-humans.
Intelligence became a part of power, and the powerful could be overthrown by the clever, think of ambushes, weapons, traps, plots...
The clever will always win out over the strong. It's how we are evolving, not bigger, but smarter. This is the proof, this is why.
And so we built weapons, atl-atl's, bows and arrows, slings, and the powerful discovered they could easily be overthrown, and so they befriended the clever, a sort of symbiosis, and together they were the new power. And perhaps now it took a hundred ape-men to overthrow power...
Power is now concentrated in the hands of kings, warlords, and it came to be represented through the abstraction of money - gold, gems, those rare and coveted items, to own these things symbolized power, not only in the ownership, but in the resources required to protect these things from others interested in them. Power is transferred to objects, the objects, status symbols that exhibit the power of the owner. We now have the birth of Status Symbols, an entire subculture that fetishizes the accouterments of power, it began with the possession of rare and precious things, then became the ability to buy the labors and skills of others (think of the clothing worn in the 16th, 17th centuries, even now), it has evolved since them to reflect itself in things like luxury handbags, ostentatious housing and expensive cars, all designed to display to potential mates and rivals the "power" of the owner.
In times of revolution, when the abuses of power have become so intolerable, it's wielder could be overthrown and the wealth - gold, money, gems - redistributed amongst the populace.
Kings grow ever more powerful. There are other contenders for power as well, there is now religion, which aggregates power beyond state borders and country lines, it allies itself with some states, alienates others, and exempts itself from the the local laws and taxation. In return it grants "legitimacy" to Kings beyond what is theirs through force or inheritance - The Divine Right of Kings. And while religions (thinking especially of Catholicism and Christianity) advertise and promote charity and missions for the unfortunate and unsaved, a surprising amount of wealth and power seem to stick with them - think of the Vatican and the Pope.
This sets the precedence for what will become the new religion: Corporations.
The aggregation of power has resulted now in Nations, where no longer can a single citizen, or hundreds, or thousands even, hope to overthrow the state, it take the will of other nations, or the combined will of an entire populace to stage a revolution.
Until now, money, wealth, merely coagulated in banks, debts were written against the concrete security of vaulted gold, gems and other valuables. But a couple of curious fictions take place. The first, banks begin to print and lend money against what they have in "reserve". As time continues this practice grows unchecked until - as of this moment - there is at least 100 times more money in circulation than there exist in reserves. The explanation of this is rather long and convoluted, but check the facts, please, don't take my word for it.
The second fiction is that of the corporation, that a group of people can unite to form a fictitious "person" whose sole interest lies in making money.
From the combination of these two fictions we see the rise of corporate Juggernauts, whose wealth outstrips that of nations and moves fluidly between countries, hidden bank accounts, and quiet stockholders and CEO's, fictional personas that yet can actively lobby, write and even enforce laws to their own end. We write mythologies of their deeds and adventures, write of their adherents, disciples, their chosen priests, we immortalize them in film and devote countless pages in books and newspapers to their exploits. They represent the final consolidation of power, Gods, imaginary beings in control of vast quantities of imaginary wealth, yet with real world impacts and consequence. They - the corporations - are the final aggregation of power, devouring one another, spawning children, and when finally we defeat them all their inflated buffoonery, wealth and power will vanish into a sea of bits and bytes, illusory, fleeting, forever lost, and we will wonder that ever we believed in them at all...
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The idea of the Psychopomp, that spirit/animal guide that leads us to the underworld, to death, or mediates the conscious/unconscious world.
A rich pasture indeed. Graze at your leisure...
Link: Psychopomp on Wikipedia
And search google, there will be plenty more ideas. Not all will be good, or even close to correct, but that's a chance you take....
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I'm agnostic. Which means that I don't know if there's a God or an Afterlife or what-have-you. To qualify it further, if you decide to bore me by telling me that you know, I'll opine that you're either a lunatic or a liar. You pick.
What I do, however, speculate upon (and I use the word speculate as opposed to belief, as "belief" always implies those crazed members of right-wing religions who are willing to die for their beliefs, however ludicrous, and I prefer to keep mine a little more open and amenable to change and revision...), is that there seems to be an orderly, scalar property to the universe, that suggests to me, well, that it might be "intelligent".
Allow me to explain.
The physicist sees the universe as subatomic particles, quarks, muons, higgs-boson, etc. Then again as atoms, then molecules, then as immutable principles and algorithms, laws that govern both the microscopic and macroscopic universe.
The biologist, as far as they've looked, bacteria, or viruses (although by definition they are not strictly speaking alive) finds life. From bacteria, through to cells, then organisms (simple cellular blobs, algae, plants, jellyfish, etc), organs, animals and beings, and from here some have gone further, we now have things like anthropologists, sociologists, ecologists, all of them find some and even all of the traits we use to define life in the larger organisms we refer to as cities, states, countries, ecosystems, societies, wherever you choose to draw the line...
We live at the scale of people and animals, it's easy for us to draw the imaginary line and say that we can see the properties of life in another individual, in an animal, some will even generously concede that while we disagree that a "group" of people are alive (society), or a "herd of animals" is possessed of the qualities of life, maybe it is...
And there are those extremists that suggest Gaia.
We do, however, seem to favor the notion that "big=better", insofar as life is concerned, that people are smarter than dogs, that dogs are smarter than cells, that cells are smarter than bacterium, it's our anthropomorphic egoism, but if we accept this, then...
I suspect that the qualities to satisfy the criterion for life, vague as they are, are more than answered in the life-cycle of a city, or a state, or a country, or a herd of animals, or an ecosystem, but to take it even further I'd suggest that as far as we can see there are the proofs of life, the farthest nebula and galaxies are the merest synapses of thoughts, that as we pan out from the universe we'll see that more and more of the criterion for life are satisfied...
Which raises some questions. Is this life intelligent? Do you feel that any cell, bacterium, organ in your body is qualified to identify you as intelligent? If you trusted your brain when you said "yes" you might be wrong...that's ego, not intelligence. Imagine, now, that we're judging the universe, from as far below it as the smallest bacterium is beneath us, no more able to understand what it's "purpose" or "reason" is than a fingernail is able to understand yours, why, then you've taken the first step of the way...