Philly Answers Youth Flash Mobs With Curfew Enforcement 377
Not that it's the first city to enforce a youth curfew, and not that kids on a crime-spree is the only variety of moral panic offered as a rationale, but Philadelphia is cracking down through increased enforcement of a youth curfew law after children and teenagers attacked two people in the Center City district — attacks which, according to police, were coordinated via text messaging.
Flash Mobs Are Nerd News Now???? (Score:5, Insightful)
And in this case, it wasn't really a flash mob at all, it was just a gang of hoodlums.
This story doesn't seem relevant to this site at all to me.
Re:land of the free. (Score:2, Insightful)
"There is no excuse for young people to be able to participate in coordinated, violent behavior if parents are doing their job. It is your responsibility, not the government's, to watch your kids."
There is no excuse for Philly police to be unable to catch coordinated, violent criminals, no matter what size the criminals are.
What if the parents are responsible and little Johnny has shown enough maturity to stay out late without a helicopter mom hovering nearby?
In the land of the free, I guess it's a crime to be out after 10 PM.
Re:Flash Mobs Are Nerd News Now???? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, a gang of *black* hoodlums, attacking innocent whites in race-hatred motivated motivated attacks.
Re:The Man (Score:2, Insightful)
See folks, as our economy declines into a Third World one - no thanks to the Republicans and the TEA Party - we're going to see more civil unrest. Of course, the rich and powerful are scared shitless of this and they're going to have more and more of these rules put into place until we have a police state. Of course, there will be plenty of backing from our fellow peons - you know the "law and order" and "if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about" Republicans.
I'd rather give away half then having it all taken away. -Joseph P. Kennedy when asked why a super rich guy like him backed the Democrats
I agree with you except for the part where you don't perceive the Democrats as also being a coequal part of the problem.
The damage they do could not be done without you. Just like the damage the Republicans do couldn't be done without their own apologists.
It's time to recognize that they are two branches of a single party, the purpose of which is to monopolize political power and lock out all competitors who are not vetted by one of the two branches. It is very much like the trade guilds of old. Neither one gives a damn about you. Neither wants a prosperous, smoothly-running nation with no crises to solve, no fires to put out, nothing to be afraid of. Neither wants an empowered, politically active average person who can think critically and will stand on principle no matter what.
What they really want are a bunch of fat, stupid, dependent, needy, divided, emotionally immature people who bicker and play blame games. This means zero accountability. It also means that when someone cries foul, it is not taken seriously because everyone cries foul all the time. Everything is the other party's fault, except the members of the other party feel that way too.
Re:The Man (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flash Mobs Are Nerd News Now???? (Score:0, Insightful)
"There is no good reason whatsoever for any teenager to be out after midnight,"
When I was a teenager I used to jog then. Much cooler, less traffic.
I can think of about a dozen other good reasons to be out after midnight without even trying.
How about you waltz on back to whatever repressive regime you came from and leave the rest of us alone to try to have a free country? Because it's people like you that are turning us into a mirror of whatever human-rights-free "people's republic" you seem to want to emulate.
Re:Philly Flash Mob != Flash Mob (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it comes off as racist. Only on the internet, where racism has taken a meaning of pointing out problems within a certain community, would it be considered racism. Back in the real world, you pretty much described what a Philly flash mob is and likely what a good part of the reason is that they occur, specifically with poor black youth. It's not racist, it's a depressing reality: the majority of a flash mob (if not the entirety) is poor and black for a reason and not by chance. It's because of these issues that the black community in Philadelphia is dealing with: being raised by no one except some sociopath who was also raised by no one, to bash heads and snatch wallets.
The school system is falling apart meanwhile, we've got a string of terrible superintendents, teachers laid off, when I was in high school 5-9 years ago, there were schools known to be absolute hell holes (I went magnet, my neighborhood school would have probably led to my death) and even now some of these kids apparently were on their way to college but they decide to just participate in this violence? There is clearly something at work here, but that being said there is also no excuse for violence, none of the "white people deserve to get bashed" internet rage is appropriate, especially when most people posting it are white but super far removed from anything close to this because they live in some rich suburb in their parent's house and then act like white people in an urban environment are spoiled children for complaining about these sorts of things.
not just flash mobs attacking, they are all BLACK (Score:1, Insightful)
You know, democracy and political correctness are completely and fundamentally incompatible.
Democracy can only work if people are free to discuss the issues that are affecting them.
Such discussions need to include all the facts. Political correctness censors all facts that expose that the ideologies that the government is trying to impose upon everyone is incompatible with reality. All reality that proves that such ideologies are impossible, bad idea, are politically incorrect to mention. Censored.
Unlimited alien (genetically) immigration is one of those ideologies. Any facts that show that importing racial enemies is a bad idea are censored.
An interesting conflict of their stance comes out of their trying to suppress reality. They claim that the world is becoming over populated. They then only ever say the solution is for us to stop breeding. They never say to cut off immigration from nations which are irresponsible with their own breeding rate. In one speech they will say we need more immigration because our birth rate is too low. In another speech they will say that we have too many people, stop breeding, stop being so irresponsible.
If only those who are responsible and moral enough to decrease their fertility rate do so, then only people who cannot help themselves will be populating the earth. The will to control oneself for the good of the environment will be bred out of existence.
Such destructive results, such conflicts of paradigm, will always occur when you fight reality and truth in order to promote your ideology.
Problems... (Score:5, Insightful)
We can talk about rights all we want, but the fact here is that what we're experiencing here is the criminal element stripping our rights away. Being unable to safely walk somewhere late at night constitutes a loss of freedom. The problem is that Americans are so used to this sort of garbage that they don't even see the problem. But I lived overseas where I could walk the streets at 3am without a care in the world. It wasn't that crime was non-existent but it didn't factor into normal routine. Sketchy neighborhoods were rare.
But the problem here is that American law enforcement is reactive, not proactive. The approach taken to crime is similar to how oppressive regimes keep sectarian conflict in check: oppression. I don't mean that Americans practice anything nearly that severe. What I mean is that they address problems with aggressive tactics; increased police presence, more arrests, etc. That only addresses the symptoms and once they're gone the problems return. And making matters worse is that this approach dehumanizes police offices, it turns them into this faceless force. They don't interact nearly enough with communities. They should patrol on foot, not in police cars.
However, the real problem are parents. Too many parents have abrogated their responsibilities. They don't care what their kids are doing, because if they did that kid wouldn't be out on the streets in the middle of the night. So, the responsibility ends up being foisted on the government. And what the government decides isn't always in the best interests of the citizens, especially when they're looking for quick results. Those quick results are effective over the current election cycle, but they never address the long term problems.
But the fact is the United States is suffering from serious cultural issues that perpetuates things like crime. Those need to be addressed properly, but honestly, I don't know see who could disagree with the benefits of enjoying safer streets, less vandalism, etc. But I suppose it's the tendency for Americans to want to stick it to the man, to the point of being irrational about it.
it's about class, not race (Score:4, Insightful)
the same things happen in other parts to the world, and it's not black kids doing it, it's poor kids doing it
the POVERTY is the issue, not the race
it's just revealing to me to see the right constantly falling into race based thinking, rather than class based thinking
it reveals the right doesn't understand the problems you create when you push social policies that create a large poor under class, rather than policies that support the growth of the middle class
the right pushes policies that makes people poor, and then they see poor people doing things because of their lame policies
and yet, they don't think "poor kids did this and that", they think "black kids did this and that"
very revealing
Re:Philly Flash Mob != Flash Mob (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not a Philly problem, this is a global problem. The UK has had feral humans like this for many years, we called them Chavs.
Society is failing to teach parents to be responsible, which is letting feral kids into the systems which disrupts educating everyone else. Until society steps up and starts taking care of the poor and helping them out of their situations, we're going to see increasing numbers of these type of people. There will always be terrible parents who let their kids run wild, but those kids can be taken care of by law enforcement, the thing society needs to do is encourage the kids around them to see them as the scum they are, not as a pack leader. As a kid everyone (yes, even you who will claim not to) followed some other kid to do something they shouldnt, be it vandalism or just stealing someone's toy for a few minutes, we have to understand this mentality and rescue kids from following the wrong role models.
We need to move beyond the 80s mentally of ME ME ME and move back to a Noblesse oblige society, where the ultra rich don't spend millions on shit they will never use and instead give back to the people and places they stepped on to get where they did. I'm sure many will cry foul and I'm talking liberal bollocks, but society is failing these people on a fundamental level, either they are living in slums and forming packs with other "dregs of society" or they are being neglected by their parents and need to be rehomed with someone more suitable to raising a child and neither of these things come for free and it's time for the super rich to come to terms with reality and not just their warped care free existance and 15 face lifts a week reality.
Re:land of the free. (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that those are two different scenarios. On one hand, they don't want police enforcing a curfew. On the other hand, they want police to take care of the few people that actually commit crimes. The latter has little to do with the former.
Re:Flash Mobs Are Nerd News Now???? (Score:1, Insightful)
If you consider a free country as one that allows youth mobs running around robbing and beating the crap out of random people, then you can have it. Personally I consider a free country to be one where I can walk around freely and not have to worry about such things. Where I live there are no curfews cause there is no NEED of a curfew. There are no flash mobs, there are no race driven gang fights
Freedom is great until people abuse those freedoms and impact the freedoms of others. Restricting the freedom of a few teenagers to stay out at night when there is no valid reason to stay out is minor compared to the freedom gained by not having to worry about being mobbed.
I'd much rather live in my world than yours. Your freedom is imaginary - mine is real.
Re:Flash Mobs Are Nerd News Now???? (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flash Mobs Are Nerd News Now???? (Score:5, Insightful)
But its time to call it like it is folks, and admit there is a reason why even though blacks have only 10% of the population they are more than 30% of the jail pop and it AIN'T racism. it is because you have this huge "thug life baby, thug life 4ever!" culture coupled with ZERO shame for having a half a dozen kids and not even knowing who the father is or having a male even involved in the child's life.
I'm not going to "call it" like any of this.
For one thing, who are the biggest consumers of rap music? White kids. That is a fact: Whites buy more rap music than anybody else, including the "thug life 4ever" music you describe. It only makes sense, because whites are the majority.
But white appetite for gangsta rap music is significant, because various black leaders over the years, including (just for example) Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy, have criticized gangsta rap as a fabrication created by the (white-owned) record labels to pander to white prejudices and bigotry. Gangsta rap music perpetuates the same kind of stereotypes first put forth by the "blacksploitation" movies of the 1970s: Black man as thug, black man as criminal, black man as sexual predator. Those movies were made by whites and white audiences ate them up.
And those stereotypes didn't come out of nowhere. They are essentially the same stereotypes that were created as a way to reinforce the institution of slavery: Don't trust the Negro. He has no intelligence, only criminality. His only interest is to steal whatever he can (which is hilarious, considering black slaves were systematically deprived every possible material possession, up to and including their own bodies). He covets white women, don't let your women near him. If you see a Negro walking unaccompanied, call the police. And so on.
To your second point, about black families not having father figures, guess what? This is America. I grew up in the white suburbs in California, and from the 1970s onward, divorce was positively endemic in that community. I barely knew anybody who grew up in a two-parent household. Judges tended to award custody to mothers, and many fathers (mine, for example) were more than happy with that situation. Most white kids tended to see their fathers on weekends, or at least a couple times a month. But that might be true of "fatherless" black kids, too -- that doesn't make their fathers into "father figures." And as for abandoning their kids? My dad was a doctor, making a six-figure salary, and my mom eventually gave up trying to collect child support for her two kids.
So what's the difference? The difference is that when compared to blacks, whites are disproportionately born into the middle class or higher. They live in communities with better schools and better access to opportunities. They live in communities that don't foster an atmosphere of criminality, hostility, and disrespect -- but that's largely because even the most disadvantaged of their peers is probably doing pretty OK, while kids who grow up in poor neighborhoods are likely to have friends who are literally living on the streets by the time they are teenagers.
The difference is that, however much you might want to wave your hand and vanish it all into the cornfield, blacks still must contend with the legacy institutionalized racism. They are still born into communities that inherit the poverty that came from discrimination, segregation, intimidation, marginalization, disenfranchisement, and all the inequalities to which blacks were subjected just 50 years ago.
Seriously, you do realize that there are probably people reading /. who were born in an era where it was actually legal to deny someone a job because they were black, right? Or for that matter, to deny them the use of a public toilet for the same reason? That doesn't just disappear overnight.
A lot of the change has to come from within the black community, true. But what