Let me be the first to suggest the US Army and the US Air Force. Keep and expand the USMC for first-response and expeditionary warfare, keep and expand the National Guard, move the aviation assets to the USN (transports, tankers, bombers), USMC (strike) and USANG (air defence), bin the land-based missile fleet, transfer orbital ops to USSF. The USAF has been a poisonous and dangerous organisation run by fanatical maniacs and corrupt criminals for most of its history and the US Army is arguably unconstitutional.
Also, rename the Department of Energy, because that really confused Rick Perry. It's the Nuclear Engineering Department.
The Federal Bureau for Taming the Fire of the Suns.
The USAF has been a poisonous and dangerous organisation run by fanatical maniacs and corrupt criminals for most of its history and the US Army is arguably unconstitutional.
Which is, of course, parallel to the knee-jerk reaction of "But what about the most deadly criminals and murderers?" of considering the Abolish the Police movement.
As if patrol cops are routinely stopping murderers in the act. Just because you want to defund the police doesn't mean you want to get rid of Bunk Moreland.
Obviously I'm on board with killing the USAF, but killing the Army is overreaction. Just for starters to make your super-USMC functional you'll need to give it so much Army logistics it'll basically be the Army anyway. More important, most of what the US military does isn't first-response and expeditionary warfare, it's sit-in-place-and-be-dangerous. For which the Army seems eminently fitted.
Yeah but having two competing armies is silly, and the USMC has too good a PR operation to be abolished.
I feel that Halfordismo demands we abolish the entire government organisations of Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Dakotas, in order to turn them into a massive strategic bison reserve.
Speaking of CPS, the FBI has just arrested Ghislaine Maxwell.
I feel that common sense demands we abolish the entire government organisations of Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Dakotas, in order to turn them into a massive strategic bison reserve.
I feel that I should check my goddamn tags.
Oh, I thought you were showing solidarity with Ghislaine Maxwell.
I forget if it was mentioned on here, but Natilo and I both know someone who very recently had a huge, months' long ordeal with CPS because she was falsely reported by [someone in her social circle who is so lunatic, self-serving and dangerous that it would take too long to explain and not be very believable anyway].
I don't even know how much was involved in lawyers' fees and she had a godawful lawyer, tbh. The court system was incredibly screwed up and an important ball was dropped, leading something that should have taken maybe a month to take four.
And do you know what happens if you're reported for drug use, at least in MN? You have random testing. They call you at basically any hour of day or night and you have...oh, six hours-ish to get to the testing site, and if you don't get there in time you fail. And of course the testing sites are incredibly inconveniently located and if you don't have a car you're pretty screwed and it basically torpedoes your work schedule AND you have to pay for the tests and they aren't cheap. If you're well-off and have a flexible schedule it's doable; if you're not, as my friend is not, it's a fucking Kafkaesque nightmare.
CPS is easy to weaponize. Once a CPS investigation is started, there is no off switch - even if the charges are obviously false, the reporter is provably a bad actor with a long history of disturbing and dangerous behavior, etc, the investigation still has to grind on. I mean, my friend was vindicated, but how nice it would have been if there had been a way to say, "huh, this 'evidence' is obviously a tissue of fraudulent video and outright lies submitted by someone who has a material interest in the outcome AND a proven track record of dangerous and illegal behavior, dismissed" right at the beginning.
The funny thing was that the social worker and guardian ad litem were actually very decent people with plenty of common sense, but the system itself was so bad that it didn't really matter.
Leaving all else aside, what happened to my friend would virtually never have happened to a middle class person. The false reporter would never have dared to make the report, for starters, and the whole thing was very much the result of the pathologies of poverty. The environment of misery, addiction, malice and intellectual impoverishment that generated the false accuser* wouldn't even exist if we didn't have such a terrible society. And of course, my friend's financial life was balanced on a hair too.
If everyone had a right to dignified, safe housing, good food, medical care, education and secure retirement, and if we had a fair justice system that wasn't run by the wealthy and we didn't cheap out on that stuff like Americans always do, we could replace CPS with basically a luxury child services office because we would need so few caseworkers.
Anyway. I don't like CPS. People are right to fear them.
*a wastrel child of relative privilege, but the milieu that shaped their malice/wastrelism was one of poverty. If wastrel child had not been living the life of a poverty-stricken drug addict, the whole thing would never have started.
15 rings true here too. I went to the caseworker for Val and Alex to complain because they were expected to hold down full-time jobs and they were expected to get to random drug testing during work hours and they were expected to do these things on opposite sides of the county with no public transit connection and no car. I don't think my complaints really went anywhere, but at least they were heard in ways they wouldn't have been
And there's no such thing as "vindicated," really. The best thing the state can find is that allegations against you are unsubstantiated. So when, for instance, Nia's first grade had a puppet show come and talk about abuse and tell the kids to come report after if they've experienced any and she did and told them "my mom" did all the things that had caused her to come into care in the first place, the state wasn't allowed to just say that but had to investigate me and ask if I'd done any of those things and then release a statement that the report against me was unsubstantiated. (And even when there is a substantiated allegation here, there's a secret appeal system where only the accused gets to speak, not the victims, and more the findings of abuse are overturned a huge amount of the time so that people who are wealthy enough for their own lawyers still have other options after an investigation. This is what Lee did, and everything related to the process we went through to deal with her abuse makes me absolutely furious but that one really puts it over the top.)
The USAF has been a poisonous and dangerous organisation run by fanatical maniacs and corrupt criminals for most of its history
In a highly competitive field Curtis Lemay comes out pretty close to the top of worst Americans ever.
Re: Ghislaine Maxwell. Is there a betting pool yet? Heart trouble? Covid? Accident? I'm assuming another suicide would be considered too gauche.
Maxwell appearing in the news for some reason made me think of Heidi Fleiss for the first time in decades. Froma 2020 vantage point, it all seems so innocent as sex scandals go.
I think the point of slashing our military is fundamentally about "we have too much military" rather than such-and-such branch not providing as much bang for buck. So even though I agree USAF is probably qualitatively worse value than other branches, I don't think interservice questions should come into it. Just cut all branches by a percentage, restructure all the contracting with a lot of layoffs, and bring back the OTA. Easy!
If everyone had a right to dignified, safe housing, good food, medical care, education and secure retirement, and if we had a fair justice system that wasn't run by the wealthy and we didn't cheap out on that stuff like Americans always do, we could replace CPS with basically a luxury child services office because we would need so few caseworkers.
Norway comes as close as any country to this description, and they have a notoriously aggressive CPS equivalent that takes children away much quicker than you would see in the US. Here's one recent scandal.
19: Yeah, but do they need that agency? It seems like the whole justification for US CPS is that we have to catch X percent of cases because of real neglect and harm even if the knock-on is Y percentage of abuse. Proactively choosing to have an abusive agency is different.
Obviously schools should also be abolished. There is massive systemic racism that the government has known about for centuries and has not successfully eradicated. Many of the individual teachers are racist too.
There have even been cases where a teacher's, or bus driver's, action caused the death of a student. Sooner or later there will be a viral video.
And there are horrible outcomes all the time. Almost every convicted murderer Trump voter policeman attended school at some point in their lives.
Worst of all, lots of students drop out, and even of those who graduate, 49.9% are below average.
I ban myself.
Just saw a relevant statistic on Twitter: the poverty rate for children in single-mother families in the US is 50.5%; in Finland, 11.7%.
(By contrast, poverty rate in general population: 17.8% vs. 6.3%. So in the US a single mother is associated with 2.8x greater likelihood of poverty; in Finland, 1.9x; less disproportion on top of the overall lower likelihood.)
I read something a few years ago, I forget where, about how the current CPS system was set up after the failure of a big legislative push for a much more robust economic support system for poor parents. (I think as part of the Great Society? I wish I could remember more details.) Ever since, the system has oscillated between periods of scandal over taking kids away from sympathetic parents and periods of scandal over not taking kids away from obviously abusive parents. The overall implication was that this may be one structural form of government action that really does need to be totally dismantled and rethought.
But not necessarily in that order.
20: I don't know, but having a robust social democracy doesn't prevent a society from thinking they need it.
The experience of friends who foster children was really eye-opening. The kids who my friends foster have been deservedly removed from some achingly horrible situations but the bar for getting the kids back includes fixing things that wouldn't be grounds for removing kids that are almost entirely the result of poverty. They won't take your kids just because you're poor, but if you are poor, you'll have a hell of a time getting them back.
I hope the Trump administration has to clean things up before it's allowed to keep Herman Cain overnight again.
He's nearly eighty and they took him to Tulsa to get infected like he wasn't responsible for the company that now makes the breakfast pizza at the Omaha airport.
I...hmm. I know a bunch of CPS workers and heard about their cases for a year in a supervision group, but I feel like that's probably of limited interest here.
Do you know anything about breakfast at the Omaha airport?
I've been watching the Netflix "Say I Do" show because it's local and I have several friends who worked on it, but episode 4 (I think; the older black couple) has a portion that is on one hand totally inappropriate in the way the gay party planner pushes the soon-to-be-adopted teen to talk about her history, but I also knew Nia would really resonate with what she said and knowing that there's someone local like this meant a lot to her.
I was the one who initially shared this post. Teo is right that different jurisdictions flipflop between taking kids in a paranoid way after a disaster and defaulting toward parents' rights when that comes to the fore. I still don't know how to feel about having the kids I do. I just sent a stroller more expensive than any I ever had to Selah's mom because I hope she'll be able to care for the baby who's coming. (I really don't know if we could pass a homestudy right now and I don't want another child now, but I really wouldn't want the baby to go to anyone else after what happened with her last sister, who has no contact with us anymore and whom she's grieved every single night for years.) I can be a good support for Mara's siblings. I can help Nia talk about how she wants to be able to write her life story. But none of them deserved this and it's hard on them, all of it.
From when I was age 8 (and my sister was 5) my sister and I were wards of the state. I have lots of feelings and contradictory opinions on this topic. I recognize that my virws & reactions are conditioned by my history and are probably not a good basis for policy making. So I'd probably best stay quiet.
Thorn, I do feel that trying to take in Selah's sibling would be a good thing (if it were necessary and if it could work for you). I do regret that my relationship with my sister is not close. It's amicable but that's it.
30, 33:
That kind of knowledge and experience is valuable and is all too absent in discussions for improvement in these agencies. To me the article in the OP seems to be written by someone who has obviously never worked or even shadowed a CPS caseload and/or been involved with forcibly taking kids out of a home.
33: I had no idea. I can understand you not wanting to share, but if you ever do feel like it, I bet it would be very valuable, internal contradictions and all.
In real life I'll refer to my foster-sister or my foster-mother by title, much as I do my god-mother. I don't think I have here very much. But it's funny what people hear and expect. I was recently having lunch with a friend I've known for 20 years and she paused, thunder-struck, and said: "wait, you were the foster kid!?!" She had thought that my foster-sister, the physician, was the foster kid. It didn't upset me and I thought it mainly amusing. But between my biological family, my foster-family (which was the last of a variety of care placements and a late one too), and my godparents' family (who are like cousins to me) I often feel I need a baseball-style program to help people understand. But usually I just speak about a relative and leave it to the listener to fill in the picture over time.
33.2: I really hope it won't come to that, but her mom will be giving birth in a pretty punitive county and I wouldn't be surprised if the baby isn't allowed to leave the hospital with her. I think Ohio would prioritize placing the baby with one of the two in-state adoptive homes of siblings before us across state lines, but we're the only adoptive family who does visits and so her family would prefer placement with us. But maybe the county will treat this differently than the last time she struggled with them and the baby's dad and his family are also involved and that might make a difference. Just her having had parental rights to other children terminated is justification enough to take a new baby into foster care even if there hasn't been any abuse or neglect.
Just her having had parental rights to other children terminated is justification enough to take a new baby into foster care even if there hasn't been any abuse or neglect.
Grrrr.