Count Dracula
Member since Nov 10, 2009
Recent Comments
Re: “The Comparison of Detroit and Memphis, Again”
"Has FEDEX Forum helped out Memphis financially? NO it sent the River Kings into Mississippi."
Oh no! How will the Memphis economy ever survive without the River Kings?
Re: “City to Hold Public Meeting About McLean Bike Lane”
And Scott is right; it's your landlords responsibility to provide you with a place to store your private possessions. Despite what the last 60 years of really bad policy might lead us all to believe, it might surprise some people that public space not intended for use as your private garage or as a free storage facility, it's intended for collective use by all, not simply those who can afford to own a car or who have access to a car.
If you don't have a place to store your car, that sounds like a personal problem to me, and something you should have considered or discussed with the landlord/realtor before you moved where you did.
I mean, if you didn't have enough room for furniture or other possessions, would you likewise expect to store it on the street in front of your house or in a nearby public park? Would you also complain when they replaced your sofa with a jungle gym, that "I've only seen two kids play on it all week!"?
Of course you wouldn't, because that would be absurd.
Why should cars be any different? You own them, the public doesn't get to use them. At least with bike lanes, they're actually open for anyone to utilize when they wish. That is, they would be open to the public, if the city didn't allow people cover them up with their oversized personal items after 7:00 PM.
Re: “Grit ’n’ Grind”
Probably pretty unpopular to say this around Memphis, but all this spending on police locally, is very akin to all the spending on the military, nationally.
As with the military and "terrorism", we are spending a large amount of money on police to address "crime" yet we spend hardly any towards addressing any of the root causes of crime.
Rather than working to eliminate crime altogether, we are actually just attempting to preserve and manage it.
The prison and jail population of this country surpasses 6 million ((far more than any other country in the world)), and yet we keep on drinking the kool-aid of more police and more prisons.
Re: “City to Hold Public Meeting About McLean Bike Lane”
Give me "lightly used" bike lanes over parking for unused cars any day.
For all the symbolic talk of making the city more pedestrian and transit-friendly, the city still archaicly puts the overwhelming majority of its money and energy into infrastructure for cars, suburban developments, and rural county annexations. Those who do walk and bike in Memphis disproportionately subsidize those who drive, yet those who drive are still left with this disgustingly selfish sense of entitlement.
It's pretty clear to anyone who has ever lived outside of Memphis for any period of time, that the problem isn't that there is too much development around bikes and transit, but that there isn't enough, and that the infrastructure that is actually built, is done so in such a half-hearted and isolated manner-- of course no one uses it.
Forgive me if I'm not terribly sympathetic about you having to walk an extra block to get to your car, but quite honestly, maybe if more people walked in Memphis (even if only to get to their car a couple blocks away) a lot Memphis' health, crime, racism, and livability issues would be solved.
The ridiculousness and flawed logic of it all, was only made completely clear to me after I moved from Memphis to Chicago. Here, you're considered lucky if you find parking 5 blocks away. So are people up in arms? Not really, my new neighborhood is thriving.
Chicagoans use the morning walk to the car as an opportunity to explore the neighborhood, meet neighbors, to excercise, and to engage with community members of all walks of life.
And the streets in my neighborhood are extremely vibrant, the community is less crime ridden, more culturally/ethnically/economically diverse, and there are a lot less vacant homes and storefronts as a result.
And this isn't something unique to Chicago, I've witnessed the same thing during my stays in Nashville, Portland, Savannah, DC, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, & Austin, as well.
Re: “It's the County Commission’s Turn on Gun Rights”
I usually don't care much about this kind of stuff, but there is so much misinformation being posted, I had to chime in.
People clearly don't understand the context of the Second Amendment. It was NOT written to ensure hunters could always hunt or ensure wingnuts could arm themselves to the hilt for the rise of "New World Order reptillians"; it was written to ensure that citizens always had the means to overthrow their own government should it start exhibiting oppressive tendencies and also to expel any foreign invaders.
And I, for one, am not sure how we'd ever defend ourselves against future fascist leaders of the most advanced military nation in the world or expel an army of invaders with a bunch of tiny handguns and low-powered rifles...
While the idea of overthrowing or challenging a fascist government, by any means other than holding up a peace sign and using a canvas shopping bag is a ludicrous concept to most American leftists today, that is primarily because they are uneducated on their own history. It's as if most people think leftism is just something that started 60s with bellbottom jeans and peace signs and that armed resistance against government was a concept started by crazy right-wing racists during the Civil War.
It didn't and it wasn't. Our own version of democracy (for all its flaws), came about through armed uprisings by leftists in Europe against the system of monarchy, which they believed allocated power and resources unfairly. And prior to that, it was the serfs challenging the unequal system of fuedalism, which they had a felt allocated resources and wealth unfairly. Since then, from Nat Turner to the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, leftists have utilized guns and other weaponry in all sorts of ways to ultimately end oppression, and create a better world.
While it might be convenient to scapegoat guns, the cause of violence is actually broader systemic problems --such as class divisions, racism, social alienation, and oppressive domestic/foreign policy. Analyze any gunman and you'll immediately find this to be the case. But rather than undergoing the pain-taking, self-analyzing task of transforming social conditions, we pretend the problem can simply be outlawed out of existence.
The mentality behind banning violence through guns, is the same mentality behind banning ideology through books. And neither of them work, because as much as you might try, you can't ban an idea out of existence. Violence still exists without guns, just ideologies still exist without books.
Re: “Gentrify My Historic Neighborhood, Please”
And speaking of crime;
Why is it that when rich folks steal an entire neighborhood from poor folks and retrofit it for their own uses, they are mythologized by the media as heroes and visionaries, but, when a poor person robs a gas station to survive because there are no job opportunities available to them, they are demonized by the media as the scum of the earth, worthy only of prison time?
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Re: “Animal Advocacy Group Plans Protest Against Memphis Animal Services”
As someone who works at a cat-specific animal hospital, I can attest that it's pretty important that your outdoor cat gets up-to-date shots. While there are countless instances of animal abuse that goes on at MAS, they are correct in suggesting that allowing an outdoor cat to roam your neighborhoods without vaccines or being spayed/neutered is another form of animal abuse that greatly contributes to overcrowding in shelters like MAS in the first place. If you don't choose to get your cat vaccinated at MAS, please do it somewhere! I can't tell you how many cats have been killed or abandoned or how many thousands of unnecessary dollars are spent on lengthy procedures every day at my work because a cat owner was too frugal and unconcerned to vaccinate their cats.