The broken windows theory is a criminological theory that states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior, and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jaywalking and fare evasion help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness, thereby preventing more serious crimes.

The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling.[1] It was further popularized in the 1990s by New York City police commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose policing policies were influenced by the theory. 

The theory became subject to great debate both within the social sciences and the public sphere. Broken windows policing has become associated with controversial police practices such as the use of "stop-and-frisk" by the New York City Police Department. In response, Bratton and Kelling have written that broken windows policing should not be treated as "zero tolerance" or "zealotry", but as a method that requires "careful training, guidelines and supervision" and a positive relationship with communities, thus linking it to community policing.

 

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

 

The Broken Window Theory has a few problems...

 

 

 

We should not be surprised if the carvings at Mount Rushmore get blown up one day, like the Taliban destroyed the Buddhist Statues in Afghanistan… It’s part and parcel of our mismanagement of our "multiple" (many) follies…

 

In regard to the “broken window theory”, we know that it works to a certain level, but needs a lot of dexterity in making sure it’s not yet another dimension of what is being revolted against. It works reasonably well at the local level. I know that by painting over the graffitis on my wall to the street has to a great extend stopped “people” tagging my wall… Erasing the tags as soon as they appear has discouraged the damaging artists... I like a blank wall... It shall stay blank...

Often, destructive anti-expressionism is as political dynamite as the expressionism of our leaders… Being anti-Trump is not good enough. Living in a state of negative anger becomes useless... You cannot piss on the symbols of the conquerors when the conquerors are still in control — even if you think they are not. I know the following image is crude and shows our revolution has a crude character, even if the point is sharply made:




It might make you feel good, but you soon will be hungry...

-------------
It was a beautiful spring day in East Baghdad in April, 2003 and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's neighbour came to him shouting, "The Americans are here." Abdul-Ahad went out into the street. He saw US soldiers in uniform pointing their guns. They were moving towards what was then known as Firdos Square, in the middle of which was an enormous statue of Iraq's President, Saddam Hussein, his right arm stretched into the sky, waving to his people.

A crowd of Iraqis had now gathered in the square. "It became clear that the city had fallen," Abdul-Ahad says. Iraqi civilians moved towards the bottom of the statue. They tried to knock down the thick, concrete pedestal, but to no avail. Then an American armoured vehicle appeared. A marine got out and put a huge rope around the statue. He climbed to the top of Saddam's head, holding an American flag. Abdul-Ahad was watching the marine as he tried to place the flag, thinking, "No don't do that.”

The statue was pulled down by the crowd. It was dragged through the street. And the iconic image was then captured of men, taking their flip flops off, and using them to beat the statue of their former ruler. They were "just breaking that domination of the regime," Abdul-Ahad says. 

Baghdad's many statues of the country's leader had been a symbol of oppression, "the eyes and moustache of Saddam following you wherever you go" he says. The day they fell "was the moment, you realise that 30 years of oppressive rule has finally collapsed, that this person who had been dominating our lives - he was bigger than God for us - is finally gone and he's removed.”

Read more:
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53184100



Before this, statues of Queen Victoria were removed in Republican Ireland for good reason. One of these statues found its way to Sydney, in front of the QVB, the Queen Victoria Building… The pseudo-democratic constitution of Australia, still allows the Queen to be the head of state and through her representatives is allowed to fiddle with our politics… This is wrong. But the statue and the building remind us of a different time and show a craftsmanship that has long been dismissed. 

So we don’t like Trump, we don’t like the Ruskies, we hate the Muslims and the Africans and the Chinese and the Martians little green men… and we hate the police... The police hates us... We froth up. We destroy the symbols of oppression but not oppression itself… We even oppress ourselves. Like Diderot, we need to do the hard yards, that is to dice the providers of illusionary comforts, the gods and the kings. True democracy demands it. We need to be responsible for our well-being, personal and social. One cannot do this with the big guy upstairs.
The kingdom in the US has been ruled by king-cash and religious hubris. Trump is a symbol and a symptom, a sock-puppet of himself, not the real thing which is anchored in the brains (heart) of all Americans who want fame and money. What is the “real thing”? Ambition? Competitive spirit? Superiority? All these things seem to be vanishing at a rate of knots to be replaced by hate, violence and robbery… How come? Is our deep nature so destructive?

Biden’s rival, Bernie, was trying to introduce a more equal social system. Bugger this! The Democrats and the oppressed, the black religious communities, canned him because socialism is "another form of oppression" and we loose our right of being a better singer than our neighbour… Biden will be our blind horse…

Bernie having bitten the dust, Trump is asking the DoJ to revoke Obamacare which was an ersatz of looking after the poor… Trump is breaking your windows again… But there is no poor in the USA, is there? Everyone has the opportunity to shine… yes? No?...

 

Bite me.

 

 

 

GL.

 

A bourgeois socialist voter...

 

 

The other side of the mount:

 

 

More to come... Possibly the complex "fractals" of politics and life...

Social science has not been kind to the broken windows theory. A number of scholars reanalyzed the initial studies that appeared to support it.... Others pressed forward with new, more sophisticated studies of the relationship between disorder and crime. The most prominent among them concluded that the relationship between disorder and serious crime is modest, and even that relationship is largely an artifact of more fundamental social forces.

But sometimes a modest quiet result is enough to sway a people rather a bombastic explosion. One of the problem with implementing the broken window theory is that it is a relative improvement that will satisfy some people and not others. 

There are always “criminal elements" in all societies, and in all echelons thereof. Some of the most sophisticated crimes will be done by the richest, by the politicians and the powerful. A few of them get away with the loot in broad daylight, with god’s assistance  Most will act covertly and never go to prison except Bernie Madoff, because his crime was to rob TOO MANY rich people with his Ponzi scheme. The real game is to rob the poor — or the bourgeois at most...

In some section of the community, crimes will be committed under peer group pressure as the fuel — not at the crime-scene necessarily, but beforehand with a cultural mindset of, especially in victimised (sometimes self-victimised) minorities. In a revolt situation, there will be free agents who don’t care about general and individual property, plus agents provocateurs encouraging looting. The windows get broken, cars are burnt, shops are vandalised, with no other purpose than to “revolt” and create chaos… Meanwhile, the peaceful mobs hold placards to tell the rest of the social order, especially the supremacists, that they’ve had enough with victimisation and racism. Fair enough. Most don’t like the provocation of the destructors and of some of the police that is not there to quash a revolt, but to stoke it, in order to have a reason for organised brutality. 

Most graffiti are puerile, some is anger expressed… Graffiti are usually performed at night, by one or two people who then brag about their exploit to the “mob”. The mob is often a bunch of adolescents or adults that never grew up and never worked nor studied to sustain a higher level of sophistication, including not being able to acquire bourgeois goods, except spray paints, possibly drugs, booze and a hood… Some graffiti artists like Banksy are trying to give the "trade” a good name. In Sydney there are a few talented artists who do some great (usually ephemeral) work. We have shown some on this site. 

In terms of breaking windows, if I understood well, we have also expose the game of derivatives and of credit default swaps that are akin to reverse-insurance against mafia-style threats in financial circles… One is being paid by the mob itself for not breaking your windows, but should your windows get broken, often by someone else on the mob’s payroll, you will have to foot the bill plus a hefty penalty. You loose. It’s nifty gambling and legal extortion, that financial people “edge” against by counter-bets.

Slowly we’re arriving at the chaos end of our journey… This is where the fractals live. People. Fractals and people are the smallest infinite details. In Germany, during the 1920s, a new art movement came to life in architecture: the Bauhaus. It’s a designed system in which there is as little details as possible, but a structure — a box to live in, stacked on top of other boxes. Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) tried to make the boxes liveable, but they are still boxes with large windows. Compared to the Renaissance, the Bauhaus was efficiently squared, with no decoration. The space is nothing else but a space that gives a boring simplicity and a frightening freedom to place your furniture into… a fallen hairpin is seen out of place. The 1970s tried to decorate the boxes with turdish wallpapers, mission brown, oranges and greens that eventually made people puke. Not to mention the shag-pile carpets in which the puke disappeared...

What has this to do with people and revolution and governments? Where one lives is going to influence one's future and choices. An Ikea store shows you how you can decorate the boxes, by stacking shelves with colourful soft objects that gives you a sentiment of personal freedom, despite the decorative objects coming from boxes with thousands of the same decorative objects… You eventually buy the box as a flat-pack. You are your own FLW by choosing where the box is going to be placed inside your bigger box…

People are fractional elements of a simplistic system run by a hierarchical structure that has no grace and is full of wrong premises from warmongering to social security and cash management, with arbitrary boundaries of various levels of who gets welfare and who gets nothing, including tax brackets  etc, all of which can become complex to manage but are simplification of people’s existence/subsistence. We need the arts and nature to feel the world. Economists often forget the arts... (and sciences)....

What is often forgotten by economics, even the brilliant ones, are the foibles of human nature, from envy, resentment to hoarding more than others. Or seen enjoying boredom and laziness  Some bourgeois (arrivistes) resent other people that want the same thing as what they have, because the bourgeoisie may think it needs a slave class to define its exclusive superiority. The flat-packs are for the pretend bourgeois… These slaves be low educated consumers, social security numbers or underpaid-makers of bourgeois goods, meanwhile the slave class will resent the bourgeoisie and instead of trying to acquire the bourgeois more expensive goods, they have to content with the cardboard boxes. 

In some cases, their resentment becomes so great, not even able to afford flat packs, they will destroy the goods of the bourgeois and of the upper class. Or steal them. The underclass citizens are often minority groups, stirred by ideals of different expressive equality and resenting racism. Amongst all this, no ideal is clean and the communications are (become more) deceitful at all levels. Very little is true, except possibly the pains, and when the truth surfaces, it is soon reburied with brown muck. Pardon me for being disdainfully satirical about the status quo… We need improvements. And Trump or Biden aren't the way to go, and they will promote their own style of deceit...

Participation in the system does not provide the freedom that is touted.  And the relative freedom is graded according to what you earn, with various levels of dedication to the system… Envy can make one jump a few echelons of wants. The system is crooked. We know.

Some people are in pain. Most people experience pain. All people have experienced pain. Not just physical, but mental which to some extend is the same thing. Fear is the memory of pain… Thus the system is designed “for life not to be easy” (Malcolm Fraser). We need to be “lean and hungry” and the system makes sure you have a certain amount of fear in your tummy to fuel the system. But not too much as to destroy our sense of commitment to the acquirement of comfort system — under a neoconservative, a semi-socialist or a communist ideal, in which greed and wants are a managed capitalistic way  — as soon as you save money or borrow from the future on credit…

Here I will examine in some details, Mark Latham. A tragedy.

Political journalist Mungo MacCallum wrote: 

Latham became leader too early in his career, he lacked the skills needed to deal with the webs of intrigue within his own party, he refused to massage the media and the advisers he did listen to were out of their depth against Howard's praetorian guard. But he had many qualities that were not only desirable and attractive but are in short supply in today's ALP. In other circumstances he could have developed into a formidable leader, even prime minister. As it is, he remains one of the great what-ifs.

Latham "knew best”. He wrote a few books that very few people have read — probably experts, academics, some pollies and himself (one wonders about this last one). The books are economic gems of economic wisdom and politics… 

For example, we are told that The Latham Diaries represent a remarkable and unprecedented statement by a former leader of a major political party. In the book, Latham is scathing about Australia's political system: 

It takes committed people ... and turns them into one-dimensional robots ... The only good news is that the public is on to them. The electorate has worked out the artificiality of it all. They can see through the spin doctors, the publicity stunts, the polling and the tricks of marginal-seat campaigning. This is why people now talk about politics with a cool anger. They have a clear feeling that the system is far from genuine. That the robots, in fact, are tin men.

This could be as close as understanding the "people" as Latham ever came, even with his other book, A Conga Line of Suckholes… He proudly never sucked up to anyone, until he eventually had to suck up to the awful fish n' ship woman, Pauline Hanson — who every political party was sucking up to as well, because she represented the bottom feeder ratbags and the gun totting fascist and racist of the white exclusive Australian society, which make le Pen in France look like an amateur — in order to get back into politics… The price was awful and degrading… but I believe that Latham though he could bring some reality into this political party run behind the scene by the little monster pilot, you know who I mean...

One does not know where Latham stands on issues such as the soon to be old Sydney Fish Market redevelopment, or whatever about the WestConnex is bringing to this city — possibly massive underground traffic jams… In an article for the Monthly, Latham wrote:

Having studied the literature and, at one time, been part of these debates, I can identify just three credible ideas that have been advanced for the renewal of the social democratic project. Each seeks to move beyond economic issues, beyond the material realm of politics, to stake out new ground. The first tries to reclaim social capital, the rebuilding of mutualism and community, as a Labor icon. The second positions Labor as an anti-establishment party, breaking down the entrenched centres of power in society. The third champions a crusade on climate change, an uncompromising attempt to roll back the materialism of western society in favour of environmental values.

By rolling in with Pauline, Mark betrayed every single points he’s ever made. And this is the tragedy of the man. He has become what he never wanted to be, but possibly always ever was...

His major work, Civilising Global Capital — on par with the great economists such as Keynes, Marx and Adam Smith — is full of theories and statistics, with little assessment/study of the fractional elements, the people… And this is where Mark Latham failed. People are not one mass of flotsam nor a mob of jetsam with buttons to press — a point he recognised but seems to never have fully absorbed. 

People are made to choose A or B when in reality they have an infinite individuality that will grumble according to where the wind of “what’s in it for me” comes from.

And this is where we could carry on and on about "our own" (often mentioned on this site) E T Gundlach, the master of advertising… Even the bees are individuals in a hive. One does not sell product to a hive*, but to individuals, the fractals of the hive — including selling flat-packs or political ideals.


GL.

Master advertising agent (bullshitting division) for 50 years and cartoonist since 1951.



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*Note: flowers "advertise to ONE BEE AT A TIME"... It has been my observation that a flower that has just been visited by a SINGLE bee (or a pollinating insect) will not be visited again for a while... until the pollen is replenished. I have never seen two bees on the same flower... It seems other bees know when a flower has already been "done" by another bee...
I could be wrong, but this has been my observations over the last 25 years.

By Philip Roddis

 

DO NOT BELITTLE PROTESTERS IN US BY CALLING THEIR STRUGGLE A “COLOR REVOLUTION”

Perhaps because I’m a Libran – not that we Librans believe in astrology, mind! – I find myself at odds with broadly mirror opposite positions on so many big issues. Take the 2016 US election. I couldn’t stand Trump but saw HRC [Hillary Clinton] as equally criminal, equally sociopathic. Moreover, her plan for Syria – the no fly zones which had reduced Africa’s most prosperous state to chaos, terror and slave auctions on the quaysides of Tripoli – promised head on confrontation between the world’s two leading military powers.

Or take Brexit. Remainers who took the EU bankers’ club to be internationalist dismayed me. But that did not lead me to conclude that a Brexit led by a rival wing of UK rulers, and informed both by atavistic chauvinism and an equally delusional vision, will be just hunky dory. It won’t, and the non dialectical view of many Lexiteers – EU is bad, ergo leaving it must, regardless of timing, context and rationale, be good – seems boneheaded. Like saying that since capitalism is exploitative, closing for-profit enterprises today so workers can build cooperatives tomorrow, in otherwise unaltered conditions, would be an excellent idea.

Speaking of non dialectical assessments, I have the same problems with both sides of the BLM debate. To deny that protests taking place in the USA aren’t accompanied by criminality (as are all insurrections) is naive. On a different note it is a duty of international socialists to point out that tipping statues of slavers into rivers while (a) enjoying the fruits of Britain’s plundering past and (b) remaining oblivious to continuing exploitation of the global south is equally naïve.

But to engage in one-sided denunciations of Black Lives Matter – even to the point of saying the US protests are “color revolutions” of the kind which, for reactionary purposes and venal goals, were hijacked and artificially exacerbated in Ukraine and Syria – seems to me equally wide of the mark.

You may or may not agree with me that a better approach to broadly progressive but limited and naïve protest movements – from CND to Occupy – is to stand in solidarity with them, while simultaneously advancing more penetrating analyses. In any case one man better placed than most to draw empirically grounded distinctions, on what is and what is not a Soros instigated “color revolution”, is Andre Vltchek, author of this piece.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/28/three-new-reads-june/

 

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In its latest attempt to tar US President Donald Trump’s event at Mt. Rushmore, CNN framed the iconic monument as a homage to slavery, despite previously dubbing it a salute to “four great presidents.”

CNN correspondent Leyla Santiago took to the airwaves on Friday to report on the president’s rally to mark Independence Day at the memorial later in the evening, putting heavy emphasis on its links to slavery and abuses of Native Americans while implying the site was chosen for those reasons.

“Kicking off the Independence Day weekend, President Trump will be at Mt. Rushmore, where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave holders and on land wrestled away from Native Americans,” she said, noting Trump would focus on what he called “the effort to tear down our country’s history.”

While the broadcast was factually correct – former presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were indeed slave owners and the monument was built on land sacred to the Lakota – it stands in clear distinction to the network’s previous coverage of the memorial. When Vermont senator and two-time presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visited the site in 2016, CNN called the massive stone carving “a monument to four great presidents,” describing how Sanders took in “the majesty of the moment” as he deemed the site an example of “our country at its best.”

Similarly, when Barack Obama visited the monument on the campaign trail in 2008, the network characterized it as “quite a sight” and “majestic” – not a word about slave owners or the historical brutalization of natives by the US federal government.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/493782-cnn-about-face-rushmore/

 

 

 

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