[nathanbedford]

Giuliani was tough but fair. These people are self-worshipping power junkies.

Yes that is very true and these left wing tyrants deserve every ounce of condemnation they get. But the story is more than that.

New York City is a place where there concentrated population density. Put rats in a confined place and they begin to turn on each other resulting in aggressive behavior. If you think of New York City as a giant Skinner box and Mayor Bloomberg the wizard operating the levers which deliver the rewards to the rats in the box, it is inevitable that he will try as he has to manipulate and control behavior. He will tell the rats what kind of pellets they can eat, and he will tell them when and where they can dance. He will cease being a Mayor and start being a wizard.

But the analogy to the Skinner box breaks down because Mayor Bloomberg does not have absolute control, he must insinuate his police force in among the the rats to quell the aggression and impose the kind of control his ambition desires. When you have a police force bigger than the Coast Guard and when you have 8 million people interacting with that large a police force, bizarre situations are going to erupt. Inevitably, the aggressive behavior of the rats, even the harmless but bizarre behavior of the rats is going to generate within that police force an us against them mentality.

Now Mayor Bloomberg is forced to choose between his established order and common sense, he must choose whether to support the culture of his bureaucratic institutions without which a city of 8 million people will degenerate into an extremely uncivil society. With 8 million people there is an institutional bias towards the institution's culture and against commonsense. If you have millions of those 8 million people who are not culturally assimilated to begin with, whose religion is different, whose language is different, whose idea of morality is different, whose idea of the rule of law is different, and whose respect for the rule of law is vastly different, we will see aggravated every tension among the rats themselves and by the rats against the institution.

By the way, if you want to generate a nice argument on these threads take up my position that overpopulation, or density of population, is itself a threat to a civil society, to a society protected by the Bill of Rights, a society that we conservatives treasure and whose agonizing death by 1000 cuts we are witnessing.

[Roccus]

Lived in Fun City for 57 years, from LaGuardia to Bloomberg. IMO, from my experiences there, the ingrained “us against them” mentality of the NYPD toward the citizenry dates to the Lindsay (R) administration.

[miss marmelstein]

Yes, but we rats get to see the greatest opera companies in the world, the finest theatre in the world, ballet, film, museum and art galleries and the most amazing restaurants and shops. It can be heaven as well as hell.

[Road Glide]

“By the way, if you want to generate a nice argument on these threads take up my position that overpopulation, or density of population, is itself a threat to a civil society, to a society protected by the Bill of Rights, a society that we conservatives treasure and whose agonizing death by 1000 cuts we are witnessing.”

I’ve often thought of this myself.

“Frontier freedom” may have been possible in an America of 90 million, or even 150 million, when most folks looked the same and came from a common “base culture”.

Change those numbers to 350 million, increasingly urbanized, balkanized by ethnicity, culture and race, and the former “freedom” changes into “friction”, and requires “pressure from above” by which to maintain a facade of civility.

It’s why “traditional values” still prevail in the less-densely populated states, and why the liberal states seem to have acquired their taint, due to the crush of people into urban/suburban areas.

[the invisib1e hand]

Bosh, FRiend. People aren’t rats.