The Political Thread

[Dandontdare]

I can't really relate to this.

Where I grew up, bigotry reared its head very early on in any conversation with any potential friend.

What's the only English word with six silent letters?
Londonderry.

It was easy to tell who was or wasn't a bigot based on whether or not they gave a shit about the difference.

When I went to uni in Dundee in '85, it was the first time I got to meet lots of people from Norn Iron (both sides), and they opened my eyes about that QUESTION that would be asked early on - Could be subtle, or could just be "what;s your name?". It had never occurred to me before the significance of common names - I went to school with Williams and Patricks and there was no conception of a difference, but my friends told me tales of getting beaten up for the wrong answer. (or of sticking razors in your lapels in case somebody grabbed 'em ... I don;'t think that's a NI thing, it's just a generally gruesome detail that's stuck in my mind!)

My own family ranges  from *not politically correct but good-hearted" to "horribly racist". My dad (86) is the most fair minded person you could meet, but I sometimes have to tell him not to use terms like "darkies". I've got a cousin however who could turn every single conversation to being the fault of paki/muslims/gypos/gays

[The Legendary Shark]

"When I'm using my umbrella in the rain in London, I hold it higher when passing other people so I don't poke their eyes out. It works okay but the last time I did this a dozen Japanese tourists followed me home."
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This joke was on 'Room 101" this evening. Is it a racist joke? Would it still be funny without the word "Japanese"? Would it be more racist with the word "Pakistani" or less racist with the word "French"?
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This comedy lark's a bloody nightmare...

[Professor Bear]

Maybe he had to qualify their nationality because the joke was that they thought he was Totorro?

What's the only English word with six silent letters?
Londonderry.

It was easy to tell who was or wasn't a bigot based on whether or not they gave a shit about the difference.

My favorite (possibly anecdotal) story was from a man who worked a second job in a Derry delicatessen counter at weekends: a customer comes in asking if they have "locally produced organic cheeses" and is told that yes, all cheese sold from the deli counter is "dairy fresh."  The customer gives him the evil eye and says firmly "you mean LONDONderry."  The man behind the counter explains that he means "dairy" in the sense of being made from milk from a cow, and the customer continues, even angrier "I don't give a fuck where they get the milk from, but if them cows is local then they're from LONDONderry."
From there, the conversation goes somewhat downhill.

[M.I.K.]

Maybe he had to qualify their nationality because the joke was that they thought he was Totorro?

Would've worked better if somebody like Phil Jupitus had said it.

[Steve Green]

I wouldn't have made the connection, it's a pretty niche reference for a prime-time BBC1 show.

[TordelBack]

Lately, I've been working an odd mix of late night/early morning shifts on a transect right through the centre of Dublin's fair city, and have had too-ample opportunity to watch the movements and antics of its inhabitants.  It's fair to say that it has been a complete eye-opener for this 43 year old.  Firstly, my conceptions of what parts of the city centre were 'dodgy' has changed completely: anywhere people actually live, no matter how run-down and grim-looking, is totally different to the no-man's lands in between; secondly, my idea of what constitutes 'dodgy' has changed: the loud and visible packs of violent staggering drunks and gangs of hard-looking boys are not the real problem: that would be the serious drugs brigade; and thirdly, my view of where I live at the much-maligned outer margins of Tallaght has improved immeasurably: we don't know we're born out here.  What we call 'trouble' is minor indeed.

Anyway, that's by way of preamble.  What's really shocked me, to the point of reappraising my views on the endless torrent of vox-pop on  the subject, are the numbers and condition of junkies in the city.  From shooting up in broad daylight in the carpark of the Department of Health no less, to OD'ing (or just seizing, I'm mercifully not clear on the details) in the middle of the traffic, to persistently robbing from 24 hour shops, grabbing and threatening people and snatching phones/tablets/bags from tourists and just staggering away, not to mention beating the shite out of each other.  And none of this down dark alleyways, but large groups, right on the main streets of the capital city, in daylight.

What really bothers me is not the threat that these guys obviously represent  to everyone else using the city centre, but the lives of the poor sods themselves. 

How does anyone come back from this, even leaving aside the physical addiction?  The most obviously affected look like living skeletons, sunken cheeks, tombstone teeth and skin lesions, but the whole group seem to have slipped into some other reality, where they exist completely outside society, grabbing what they can and doing what they have to with no concern for or reference to the masses that flow around them.  The cops are called after some shop robbery or other.  They arrive, talk to people, the junkies wander off, the cops stand around for 10 minutes looking grim, and then they go, and the junkies reassemble and continue as before.  Obviously arresting them isn't going to do any good whatsoever, but nor is ignoring them.

Where are these people going to be in a month, in six months, in a year?  What can be done to help them out of this mess?  Has an city come up with a workable solution of care and rehabilitation?  It's as if there was some outbreak of a terrible illness right there in the heart of the capital, a modern equivalent of leprosy or something, and it's just being ignored.

I know this all sounds painfully naive at my age, but I've lived in some pretty rough situations in the past myself and I've worked with a homeless charity, and talking to the crews I'm working with, who have lived and worked in cities all over the world, I'm not alone in finding this situation to be genuinely shocking.

Is there a solution?

[NapalmKev]

We used to have a similar problem here in sunny ol' Exeter. Hordes of heroine addicts would congregate on the Cathedral Green in the heart of the city centre, doing their bit for the Tourist trade.

I've known many people who have dabbled with the harder end of the drugs scale (LSD was my limit, you can keep heroine and crack lads, it's not my bag at all). Some have managed to come off of the shit, and some have allowed it to destroy them and turn into absolutely horrible C***s.

Education is part of the problem, and I would also suggest lack of resources in deprived areas plays its part, but ultimately there will always be a few that quite literally 'can't help themselves' and take to the Pipe/syringe just for fun.

I cannot think of a clear solution to the problem.

Cheers

[TordelBack]

What worries me is that I'm starting to see where taxi-drivers* are coming from.  They have a similar perspective to the one I'm currently getting, sitting around all night on the street in the midst of all this, it's easy to see how you could find yourself angrily ringing up late-night talk shows.  As far as I can see, the only official response is to move these people on, temporarily.  That annoys me because I can't see how that's going to help them, or in any way reduce the problem, and I imagine it annoys tax-drivers because they aren't being shipped to a concentration camp.

I agree with you NapalmKev, getting in there early and heading people down a different path is the solution, but even allowing that that might be possible, what do you do for the people whose lives are basically destroyed, who no longer live in the same world as the majority? 

It's pretty bad watching an iPad being yanked from the hands of a tourist, but it's worse watching some lad shooting up100 yards away a few hours later, and realising that these are just two points on a cycle, except that the junkie is more a victim of this problem than the people he robbed.




*Obvious generalising and straw-manning of taxi-drivers follows.

[JOE SOAP]

What worries me is that I'm starting to see where taxi-drivers* are coming from.  They have a similar perspective to the one I'm currently getting, sitting around all night on the street in the midst of all this, it's easy to see how you could find yourself angrily ringing up late-night talk shows

Tordel Back = Travis Bickle.

[The Legendary Shark]

Government isn't going to solve this - there's no profit in humanity. We have to do it ourselves, individually, as best we can. You can't help them all but, if each of us takes the responsibility of looking out for our families/friends/neighbours then that's a start. We can't just carry on sitting around waiting for the government to come up with a (final?) solution.
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Do what You can for who You can when You can and leave it at that. If others follow your example that's fantastic but if they don't then at least You've done something - whether you succeed or not.
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How can we expect other people to solve these problems if we don't, or in some cases won't, try solving the smallest part of them ourselves, personally?
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[JPMaybe]

Government isn't going to solve this - there's no profit in humanity. We have to do it ourselves, individually, as best we can. You can't help them all but, if each of us takes the responsibility of looking out for our families/friends/neighbours then that's a start. We can't just carry on sitting around waiting for the government to come up with a (final?) solution.
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Do what You can for who You can when You can and leave it at that. If others follow your example that's fantastic but if they don't then at least You've done something - whether you succeed or not.
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How can we expect other people to solve these problems if we don't, or in some cases won't, try solving the smallest part of them ourselves, personally?
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Because I have neither the training nor the psychological makeup appropriate to helping a drug user, and I'd wager neither do most of the posters here.  How exactly do you think the multiple, highly-specialised professions and massive resources needed to tackle a problem like widespread heroin addiction can be coordinated without government?  States can and have enacted changes that have massively improved the situation, something that would be impossible if your kneejerk individualism held any water.

[ZenArcade]

A desperately sad and troubling subject. We generally see only the end 'product' in a process riven with heartache and horror all the way through. If we look at the passage drugs sucha s Heroin or Cocaine. Take them from initial production, cocaine from South and Central America the Mexico drug war (a truly beastial affair) or the many other nations blighted with this problem; Heroin from Afghanistan (another disaster zone) through the banking laundering of proceeds through to the addiction and endemic criminality to 'feed' habits. There is an endless process of murder, rape, intimidation, theft etc.
There are two general approacher to dealing with the issue:
1. Law enforcement to interrupt at source; to interdict the transmission and to arrest and punish/rehabilitate the end users. This hasn't worked. It has fueled oppression in the producer states/failed states. It ignores the investors and launderers and as TordelBack has attested to, signally fails to deal with the domestic results in the West.
The other potential solution is legalisation. Many states especially in South America have moved towards this and it is constantly put forward by politicians/law enforcement officials and others domestically.
To my mind prohibition has not worked in any manner and the latter option should be put forward internationally (it will not work piecemeal). The process should be subject to regulation and oversight and at least tried out. Z

[Frank]

Has an city come up with a workable solution of care and rehabilitation ... Is there a solution?

No, but Portugal decided to treat drug use as a medical problem rather than a criminal one, and saw a drastic reduction in the human carnage associated with hard drug use:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/portugal-drug-decriminalization/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-after-decriminalization-drug-abuse-down-by-half-in-portugal/

Switzerland, The Netherlands, and Germany adopt the typically pragmatic approach of allowing heroin users to shoot up free heroin in government clinics. Celts aren't Germans, and this article probably paints an overly rosy portrait of happy and fully employed smack addicts with great dentistry, but there at least appears to be some value in getting users into a system that allows social services to provide them with support and structure:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/5043766.stm

[NapalmKev]

Legalization certainly has some appealing aspects. If the drug of choice could be obtained from a 'shop', if you will, then at least it would remove the need to deal with 'twats in alleyways with Gangsta dispositions'*.
Also, the 'product' would have to be regulated, in which case you know your "Getting the good stuff".

It could further argued that Legalization would reduce Crime; Trafficking at the very least.**

Cheers

*some people will still go for this method of course.
**I'm not Endorsing the taking of 'Drugs', It's not Cool, clever or 'Hard'. Bear that in mind while you're drinking Coffee and Smoking ciggies.

Once again, Cheers

[ZenArcade]

What Napamkev!! Zenarcade  screams, throwing his can of special brew at the computer screen and burning the carpet with his dropped fag in horror!!!