It protects criminals from the consequences of their actions and prevents them or anyone around them from ever tapping into collective resources (ie the police) rather than having to act alone.

The law is decided by the criminals, so becomes arbitrary and unjust, especially when combined with violence.

Cam’ron only looks foolish because he’s caught between two worlds, with conflicting rules and acceptable behavour. One thinks he should call the cops on the serial killer, the other thinks he should pre-emtively strike against him.

He can say neither in that context (national TV) so lets both down.

part one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA94cDswvQ4

part two
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au38PyH9J7k

and what interests me is that, in part two, the dude who filmed and sold these dvds, “not to snitch or anything”, snitches when it comes to defending his product. ok, so maybe not so much rational choice shit aside, because this video is really easy to interpret as a fleshing out of that archetypal example of game theory, the prisoner’s dilemma– that game where the smartest move is always for one prisoner to betray the other (the divide and conquer techniques of white slave holders are really easy to obfuscate w/mathematical abstraction). it even comes complete with an occasionally chuckling, faux-perplexed white moderator instigating shit and distancing himself through linguistic signals that exaggerate the distance between ‘his world’ (‘our’ world, since it’s the news) and ‘theirs’ (the criminals’).

As to your arguments I don’t really understand what you mean, but I get the idea that you disagree with me and think I shouldn’t talk about this stuff.

Oh well. I never claimed to be “down”, be a criminal or any of that. I do however talk to my friends about these things and think about them and sometimes have things to say. The main goal of any of these posts is to have a discussion, something I enjoy. I am not writing some kind of hood-policy paper that I want to everyone to adopt and sign into street-legislation, just expressing my thoughts upon seeing some of this stuff (yup, on YouTube).

As far as speaking against crack rap now while having put out gun tunes a) I never claimed that my music and all the statements of the artists I’ve worked with comprise some kind of consistent ideological framework and b) I think there is a difference between gun tunes I’ve put out and the Dips relentless crackism. That’s just me. I actually have listened to a lot of Dipset music and enjoyed it at different moments but watching that clip I had a few things I wanted to say about it.

As far as black and white, I was talking about a phenomenon (the stop snitch catch phrase, t-shirts, etc) that is predominantly a black-urban one, hence bringing in slavery, which is, yes, something I think about.

Especially, as a side note, having read Octavia Butler’s excellent novel Kindred recently. Wow! Everyone should read it, even you, uknowho.

If you want to lump that under white guilt, OK, I agree, white people are guilty of a great many atrocities against pretty much everyone else on earth. If being white and from my “privileged manhattan existence” (oooooh, diss!) means I shouldn’t ever express views about anything outside of that, well, sorry, I’m going to. Just be mad.

I don’t understand your whole bit about white gangsters and fear of being a snitch at all and it seems a little tangential so I’m not going to speak to it.

I’m happy that through my ignorance I was able to offend you enough to write something and contribute to the discussion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stNP7rR6Sq0

also –
http://stopstopstopsnitching.com/

I think we agree that we’re seeing the consequences of *misapplied* rational choice theory in the case of Cam’ron’s handlers. Cam’ron then, according to our discussion, is a pawn for creating a certain type of consumer. To me it seems like a kind of cultural manipulation, whereby the rational choice model is employed to gain money by convincing the maximum number of a given public that the product being pushed is authentic and socially viable. To me, that looks like a sociopathic organization acting to reinforce sociopathic tendencies in its consumers. Yikes.

it’s not so much that white boys are the audience, rather that i feel that they are kind of central to any consideration of this topic in terms of audience. i think this is the case because of the way the entire snitching thing is presented in the mainstream media–as some sort of tribal code or custom common to poor neighborhoods, now promoted by this now-rich hypocrite.

what i’m trying to say is that i think, in a lot of ways, cam’ron’s role is a useful distraction because it focuses the no snitching thing on him and the things he says as a guy who could very well be participating in the act birdseed describes. and it does this for the audience of the two agents i described earlier, who i feel are largely gringo grown-ups who are fearful of these trends affecting their white boys.

white boys

what rational choice theor*ists* say is ‘best’, with some sort of reference to the system’s equilibrium, is another story entirely.

the critique adam curtis makes in the trap (almost word for word what you’re saying here) is spot on, except that i feel it’s too easily interpreted as debunking rational choice theory, instead of questioning its application to all contexts. for example, i think there’s no doubt that people, like rappers, who are to a large extent in business for themselves (that is, they create their own niche market/audience/demographic), employ this type of decision-making.

it is also the same type of decision-making a company (say a giant record company, or a gianter news company) might employ when it’s choosing to put a black rap artist with a new album on primetime television, talking about a polemical catchphrase that is on the radar at the time.

applying a rational choice model to this behavior takes us very quickly to some of the issue/mechanism at work here. if we assume a large record company or news company (the two agents responsible for cam’ron’s appearance on the program) acts giving full priority to maximizing its own profits, the decision to have cam’ron on and talk about this issue must have been made because the predicted result was a larger audience (which is what must be optimized in order for either of these entities to maximize profits).

so, the question it boils down to is who is the audience these agents (not so much, cam’ron, i don’t think) have in mind? this is a recurring theme at these great dutty artz threads (props to matt and co. for starting the discussion), and i think it’s important. because, as lamin makes clear with his situational question, there’s more than a few actors out there that have absolutely no say in the decision of whether and how to reproduce this message.

Rational choice basically says that the system will balance itself if everyone acts in their own best interest. This is why the Republican Party is always screaming for deregulation. We’re all currently witnessing the economic and social consequences deregulation. The problem with this idea is that it induces incredible paranoia into the system: if my competitor is acting in his own best interest, doesn’t that mean he’s going to cheat? If he’s going to cheat, then I’ll have to cheat just to keep up! To get ahead I’ll have to cheat just as much as possible without getting caught.

Matt, thanks for pointing out the history of the moral code of not snitching (MCNS, let’s say). It appears to me that Rational choice theory is the perfect stealth strategy for perpetuating the MCNS not just among those who grew up in it, but those who consume its products. Instead of straight up slavery it’s wage-slavery, and once I scrape together enough bills to buy that new Cam’ron album, what do I hear? The propagation of a moral code developed by slavers and mathematically legitimized by Rational choice theory.

And by the way, Rational choice theory was developed at the RAND Corporation by Steve Nash in the 1950′s… if you’ll remember, Steve Nash was suffering from undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia in the 1950′s. So basically, the system of unrelenting selfishness and pessimism RAND developed to combat the Red Menace has been applied to every aspect of Western life since then – and what did we get out of it? We got Cam’ron and an economic disaster.

It used to be that art imitated life, but now I think life imitates art. Too bad so much art comes from sociopaths like Cam.

So really, I don’t think the question is whether Cam’ron is a sociopath but why he feels the need to pretend to be one on camera. Who connects and relates to it? Who is he reaching out to?

Cam’Ron’s interview was hilarious, definitely one of the most ridiculous segments ever aired on the program –I only wished Ed Bradley was alive and had conducted the interview, instead of Anderson Cooper. People laughed at Killa Cam, when he said he’d “move.” (“That’s a bitch move, Cam”, “Cam lost some points right there”)

The “no snitch” ethic/campaign (and “fuck the police” mentality) was prevalent, a phenomenon at an all time high in hip hop around the time the interview aired (just as we have (had?) the “no tight clothes” campaign this year in hip hop and dancehall). These campaigns are not that important, they’re fashion–like the gang bandanas you can buy in beauty shops.

It’s great the historical context you put this in, Matt… centuries of abuse, unfair drug enforcement and mass incarceration policies can also be added that history.

So we have American history, recent Black (and Latino, to a lesser extent) cultural influence/phenomenon, criminal code/honor among thieves, and reality/truth—A family (Mother, father, children) was burned to death in Baltimore for informing authorities about drug dealers in their neighborhood. which holds more weight? Harm communities the most?