The Boston Police Department has a union. This union has a newsletter. This newsletter is uproariously terrible, full of diatribes against liberals and multiculturalism that would feel right at home in an AM radio show in 1993. Interestingly enough, it also includes advertisements from those corporations seeking to curry favor with their enforcers, which also functions as a useful list of corporations whose office windows a liberal multiculturalist might --
wink-wink -- want to a throw a brick through.
Here, for instance, is Converse praising the police state with an ad featuring, curiously, the sort of insufferable hipster whose skull the uniformed dipshits producing the newsletter would probably kick the shit out of if they saw him at an Occupy protest:
If you hate yourself and want to extend that hate to the world around you, check out the
rest of the issue (the final stab to the gut: it's a PDF).
What an awful reading of this union newsletter!
ReplyDeleteAre you seriously a journalist, because you are so lazy! I took the time to read through the whole newsletter. Most of it was police history, people telling jokes and sharing random thoughts, or complaining within their own community. It is ok to be sad veterans don't get enough respect, which is what a few articles were about. It is also ok to admit you enjoy having an iPhone. Most of the ads were about how such-and-such corporation supports police childrens scholarship funds, which I also think is fine. Yes, James Carnell, the editor of the newsletter, comes off as bigoted, misogynistic, and sort of mean, much like Limbaugh or the other jerks. His response to the occupier is Too Good To Be Satire. But the corporations that advertise in this newsletter deserve no special violence, as you suggest (wink,wink) they do. It's possible a lot of cops think Carnell is a fool, but don't have the time or political power to edit the newsletter. I don't understand how you get by as a journalist.
Please. Nearly every page is filled with misogynistic hate and hippie-bashing. See here, for example: http://jezebel.com/5921836/boston-police-department-union-has-an-incredibly-fucked-up-newsletter?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_twitter&utm_source=jezebel_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
ReplyDeleteYou also have to be rather naive to think that major profit-driven corporations, like Nike-owned Converse, simply give money out of the goodness of their hearts. Every donation they make is politically driven, as when JP Morgan gave the NYPD tens of millions of dollars at the same time the Occupy Wall Street movement was taking off: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/is-jp-morgan-getting-a-good-return-on-4-6-million-gift-to-nyc-police-like-special-protection-from-occupywallstreet.html
I think the "Sand" piece is damning enough by itself...
ReplyDeleteOk. I still defend the integrity of this newsletter, which I think is pretty harmless but obviously run by a hack. From the Jezebel source I looked for articles not written by Carnell (who we agree on). The other quotes came from what I referred to as the "jokes" section. Are they offensive? Yes. But that article starts with "For the record: All chaps are “assless.”"
ReplyDeleteThe suicide mission jokes are also in poor taste. On the flip side, isn't that entire series of jokes a rendering of anti-imperialist critiques of the war on terror? If Zizek and Baudrillard had the income, family life, and social milieu of Boston cops, they may have put it the same way.
As for my naivety, I day-dream about black blocs, so I don't think you need to worry about me.
I think police-newsletter and police-state are two different things, and someone who is paid to sift the world of information to share relevant bits with a national audience should do better than "the boston police newsletter is run by a jerk and also tell your friends converse isn't cool anymore stop buying their stuff".
I don't think the fact that it's meant as a joke dilutes the blatant racism/misogyny of that piece...
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think it's relevant in that it gives a snapshot of the kind of mentality people in law enforcement seem to have.
ReplyDelete