A city in crime hell becomes a Big Brother inferno

Camden, NJ is well known as one of the most godforsaken places in the supposedly civilized world -- Detroit East if you will. For whatever reason, there have been more efforts to keep it from becoming a literal, total wasteland than other ruined cities and communities. And as the article you're about to read shows, since the police force in Camden was almost totally phased out the remedies are not not exactly in the line of better policing but of leveraging the surveillance state forward. When policing improves in such situations, that's wonderful, but probably of only strategic interest to the planners.

Ever wonder why politicians do things like pay the least responsible citizens to outbreed the most productive? Simple -- the more welfare, the more trouble. Yes, they want trouble and lots of it in order to have something to save us from! When the trouble reaches the level of total breakdown in a community with most people being recent crime victims, that's when Big Brother gets to come in and take over -- a clear case of Hegelian dialectics (thesis -- antithesis -- synthesis).

Big Brother loves reviving distressed properties, so he makes lots of them happen. He's doing it to this entire country at once (except for the reviving part) and if we don't stop current trends, every one of us is going to live in a Camden or Detroit. Either you'll live in crime-saturated anarchy or a Camden-like aftermath, where surveillance cameras "can spot a stash in a discarded pack of Newports from blocks away" and "Police have a giant 30-foot mobile crane called SkyPatrol they can park in a neighborhood and essentially throw a net over six square blocks."

Great for making the streets safe again -- maybe -- but it has the curious side effect of enabling Orwell's 1984 to come truer than ever before.

http://www.amren.com/news/2013/12/apocalypse-new-jersey-a-dispatch-from-americas-most-desperate-town/
Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch From America’s Most Desperate Town
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/apocalypse-new-jersey-a-dispatch-from-americas-most-desperate-town-20131211?print=true

Since this article originates with Rolling Stone mag, it's socialistic and "racially correct" to the hilt. What I don't follow is how its staff can object to urban ruin when its exactly what the "artists" they promote model and glorify at a milliom bucks a concert. "Punk", "gangsta" and "rap" are ghetto buzzwords, and each represents a different musical religion promoted by the media and embraced by multiple generations of youth.

In our time the naughtiness embodied by the Rolling Stones has gradually, steadily morphed into the very real criminal rottenness of top music groups and become the anti-cultural mainstream.

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