[FRIAM] Santa Fe Plaza Riot

Wed Jun 3 14:44:14 EDT 2020

Does it make me a sociopath for me to hope big cities *do* collapse and
become a thing of the past? People who know me well understand when I say I
like persons, but not people, which is to say that while I treasure
individual friendships and relationships, I at best tolerate crowds. I
think we have not evolved the psychological mechanisms to live together
in great concentrations. Our advanced civilization is much too young to
qualify as having stood the test of time, a few measly tens of thousands of
years is such a small blip in time compared to the time life has existed on
our planet. I personally believe that the Earth would be much better off
with under a billion (highly educated) people, with AI and robotics
providing for the bulk of our material needs, and that is something we
should as a species strive for. But then, I could be absolutely,
completely, wrong about all this, and instead just be a sociopath. I hope
not.

On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 11:48 AM Merle Lefkoff <merlelefkoff at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Biofilm, huh?  I think you may be on to something.
>
> Returning a long-overdue book to the downtown Santa Fe library last
> evening, I took a walk thorough the plaza to see how our "phase two" was
> coming along.  There were about 40 police strolling about--with only a few
> pedestrians, locals all wearing masks, and a few unfortunate tourists (not
> wearing masks, evidently not needed in the biofilm).  There had been a
> rumor of a demonstration which had not materialized.  So the officers were
> enjoying the evening "break", as they told me.
>
> I can't sleep at night worrying about how we're going to keep peace in the
> valley in the near future as the quickening collapse of our systems becomes
> logarithmic.  Many big-city police are recruited based on former military
> service.  Also, many who get a high from dealing with violence are
> attracted to policing.  The recruits are then trained as warriors, not
> peacekeepers, today even dressed for duty on the "front lines".  Beyond the
> systemic context of racism, poverty, etc. etc., the elected city mothers
> and fathers who theoretically "control" local law enforcement either don't
> give a damn, or they're scared of the very powerful police unions.
>
> I'm old enough to remember the release of the President's National
> Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder, known as the Kerner Report,
> FIFTY-TWO years ago in 1968. After surveying 24 "disorders" in 23 cities,
> the final conclusion was that "Our nation is moving toward two societies,
> one black, one white--separate and unequal". The report then went on in
> extraordinary detail to describe the challenges of pervasive racism and the
> absence of political will to provide the federal money needed to intervene
> AT THE SYSTEM LEVEL.  It was quite remarkable to read again; every word
> could have been written today; President Johnson immediately dismissed the
> report, released on February 29; and on April 4 Martin Luther King was shot
> dead.
>
>
> https://hystericalcolorblindness.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/kerner-commission-report-pdf/
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 9:47 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Aside: Do you avoid using the Reply mechanism on purpose? The subject
>> seems to be a normally formatted reply, but there are no References:
>> headers in your posts. This prevents threading clients from treating your
>> post as a reply. It seems like you're using the Gmail web client. But I
>> haven't read email headers in awhile. So who knows?
>>
>> I entertain a long-running (longer than usual for me) ill-formed
>> hypothesis that as our population density approaches the carrying capacity
>> of the earth, such isolation will be more and more rare. And that diversity
>> will also go down. We'll become more of a biofilm (or superorganism) on the
>> surface of the earth and less of a seething constellation of differentiable
>> agents. One hitch is that as climate change worsens, some places will be
>> the exclusive playgrounds of the wealthy (wealthy enough to own the water
>> and supply chains to move goods to these rarified places). So you
>> optimistic elitists living in compounds like Santa Fe (parasitic off those
>> of us who might still function more naturally as climate change blossoms)
>> will become more and more isolated while the rest of us become more and
>> more like a biofilm.
>>
>> So you'll need to cling to your diversity while it lasts because WE are
>> coming for you! >8^D
>>
>> On 6/3/20 7:41 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
>> > I personally find the Santa Fe police force to be very good at being
>> > empathetic and encouraging peaceful conflict. As someone who has spent
>> > half of my life living in dense urban centers, I often feel a
>> responsibility
>> > to witness when I see police interactions with others. Moving to Santa
>> Fe has
>> > done a lot to remediate my feelings around the police. Further, while
>> there is
>> > a very long way to go wrt race and equity, the discussion has been
>> explicitly
>> > in motion here in New Mexico for a long time. Is it possible that our
>> apparent
>> > /isolation from the broader unrest/ is a sign of maturity within our
>> social
>> > discourse? I have some concern that there may be a rising pressure
>> > across the diverse regions of our country to abstract away our
>> differences,
>> > and to behave as if the discourse is /everywhere the same/. Doing so in
>> > many cases would erase the very good work that has been hard-won.
>>
>>
>> --
>> ☣ uǝlƃ
>>
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>
>
> --
> Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
> President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
> emergentdiplomacy.org
> Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
> merlelefkoff at gmail.com <merlelefoff at gmail.com>
> mobile:  (303) 859-5609
> skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
> twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
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