In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.
The religious right is motivated by the suspicion that someone, somewhere,
is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.
One county in Georgia has a solution for those outrageous salaries that firefighters are getting: Convict them of crimes, send them to prison, then assign them back to firehouses as prison laborers. Pure genius! If only the good colonels of the Old Confederacy had been so ingenious, they coulda kept slavery going in the South, like, forEVAH!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
(Who doesn't look good in stripes, thus is glad he's not in Georgia).
Ground rules: Comments that consist solely of insults, fact-free talking points, are off-topic, or simply spam the same argument over and over will be deleted. The penguin is the only one allowed to be an ass here. All viewpoints, however, are welcomed, even if I disagree vehemently with you.
WARNING: You are entitled to create your own arguments, but you are NOT entitled to create your own facts. If you spew scientific denialism, or insist that the sky is purple, or otherwise insist that your made-up universe of pink unicorns and cotton candy trees is "real", well -- expect the banhammer.
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Hmmmm. A mostly white bunch of Southerners have found a way to force a mostly black group of prisoners to do work that no one else really wants to do for no money. Something seems wrong with this picture.
ReplyDeleteNothing wrong with the picture, other than the fact that we need another General Sherman to rampage through the place and teach'em a little humility again :).
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Pining-for-good-ole'days Penguin
One thing the article and the comments barely touched on was that prison inmates are worthless as workers. The ones I met when I was a prison nurse were undisciplined, disorganized in their thought processes (that might have been due to selection bias, though, because it was a prison full of mental malfunctionaries) and prone to arguments. They tend to steal whatever's not nailed down, too. In a living situation where deprivation is overwhelming -- prisons are like the Third World in terms of the population having NOTHING -- the have-nots naturally grab anything they can. Great as trade goods back inside The Wall.
ReplyDeleteImagine the worst person you ever worked with, multiply their bad traits x3, and you've got an inmate-employee. I'm not saying EVERY one is a screw-up, but I reckon the majority are. What a potential disaster!
Therefore, I hope Georgia does it, because fuck those crackers. I believe that people should be allowed to live with the full stupidity of their decisions.
Well, Bukko, see, here's the deal. The dumb criminals -- the undisciplined disorganized ones -- are the ones who end up in prisons. The smart ones? Well, they become Wall Street bankers and steal with impunity with no fear of ever spending time at Club Fed. Alrighty, then!
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
"we need another General Sherman"
ReplyDeleteAnd not the touchy-feely, Alan Alda-type softy they got last time, either. They need the kind of lesson that would make Vlad the Impaler say, "Shit, dude, over the top!"
I'd reply to your message, Nan, but I'm too busy wiping the coffee off my monitor screen :).
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Laughing Penguin
Actually am in Georgia. Yeah, really. So, your line about lizard people from the planet sociopath is SO useful in my environment here.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, I want to add, Howard Dean was right about having a clue about hooking up with progressives who are here, because we have to be tough to be that way in this place. So have a care - John Lewis, Jimmy Carter - don't toss the progressives out with the bath water.
ReplyDeleteAlso, next time through, leave the gorgeous architecture alone please. If you could see the one town in Sherman's path that he didn't torch, it could teach you folks a thing or two about how to design buildings that work with the environment. Plus, they are so fucking beautiful too. For that matter, Charleston still is, if you care to google it and see for yourselves.
The unobservant think the Civil War amendments outlawed slavery. But consider the 1871 Virginia Supreme Court ruling, Ruffin v. Commonwealth on prisoners: “For the time, during his term of service in the penitentiary, he is in a state of penal servitude to the State. He has, as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time being a slave of the State.”
ReplyDeleteFor a while this became less true in the USA, but it fits the last few decades well, and becomes ever truer.