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How strong can anyone defending those causes be? These people are weak and pathetic, and they’re getting weaker. And boy, are they showing it. Way to gear up with combat helmets and the submachine guns, fellas, to take on a bunch of co-eds sitting Indian-style. Maybe after work you can go break up a game of Duck-Duck-Goose at the local Chuck E Cheese. I’d bring the APC for that one.
Bravo to those kids who hung in there and took it. And bravo for standing up and showing everyone what real strength is. There is no strength without principle. You have it. They lost it. It’s as simple as that.
"Oakland's finest flipped with brutal flair. To be expected. The Occupy movement tests our owners' patience. Occupiers not only dig in for a long haul, awareness and desires expanding, they're making the political system look bad.
Official tears shed for Arab demonstrators now seem cynical. Well, to those who took it seriously. Double standards are an American constant. Endorsed by God. Consecrated by the Founders."
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Keith Shannon, a fellow Iraq vet, said, “Scott was marching with the 99% because he felt corporations and banks had too much control over our government, and that they weren’t being held accountable for their role in the economic downturn, which caused so many people to lose their jobs and their homes."
When you march with the 99%, you've tipped your hand. You are, as Chomsky once noted, the domestic enemy. Tear gas, rubber bullets, truncheons, and sonic cannons (field tested on Iraqis) are your citizen badges.
The One Percent are in it for the duration. Matching their tenacity without succumbing to their brutality remains an ongoing, vital test.
"A New York police officer leans forward and yells as if attempting, with the sheer force of his anger, to hold back time. His rage is understandable for, in this photograph, you can actually see the world turn upside down and all that was solid melt into air. This truly is a picture of a turning point in the history of the world."
"Official government violence against nonviolent Americans and residents, by contrast, occurs daily. And for the last 30 years it has been increasing at an alarming rate. From the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, University of Eastern Kentucky criminologist Peter Kraska conducted an annual survey on the use of SWAT teams in the United States. Until the late 1970s, SWAT teams were generally used in emergency situations to defuse conflicts with people who presented an immediate threat to others, such as hostage takers, bank robbers, or mass shooters. But beginning in the early 1980s, police departments across the country began using SWAT teams to serve drug warrants.
Kraska found that the number of SWAT deployments in America increased from 3,000 per year in the early 1980s to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s. That’s about 135 SWAT raids per day. The vast majority of those are for drug warrants."
"This isn’t the conservative response. I think there’s a sense that conservatives are like liberals here but want a slightly more tilted playing field, one more in favor of prosecutors and against suspects. There’s that element to it, but for conservatives the point of coercive power isn’t to establish fair procedures to hold it in check but instead to maintain order."
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One of the sharp moves of modern progressive and liberal thought is to move moral weight away from premises to procedures, processes and rules. Rules where the enforcement of procedural integrity, rather than any specific outcome, are key for its justification. Where outcomes are justified not because they correspond to a immutable principles but instead because they adhered to the correct procedures. The emphasis is usually that this levels playing fields, provides access to individuals, holds people accountable, etc. What’s equally important is that it provides legitimacy for the system itself.
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For the neoconservative intellectual movement, the problem is that the role of police went from one that maintained order to one that enforced and implemented rules based on the acknowledgement of individual rights. The problem isn’t that the rules are tilted one way or the other; the problem is that enforcing rules are front and center in the rules of what state power does.
"I suspect that what’s happening is that people are more averse to disorder now than they were then. The demand for marches to be repressed is part of the same mindset as bansturbation - even against things that don't exist - and the taking of offence at any slight to our sensibilities.
But why has this mood emerged so much since the 80s? Here are a few possibilities:"
Victim blamers are often also telling a story about how they personally will never be raped, or in this case, arrested unfairly for doing something totally legal. To blame Gates for being stupid is to say, ”I would never get arrested for breaking into my house, because I have the sort of self-preservation instincts that this man is clearly missing.” People enjoy the illusion of having more mastery of the world than they do, because it makes them feel safe, but it also contributes to an atmosphere where victim-blaming can flourish, particularly in situations that are loaded with racial or gender politics.
I have been wondering why I'm so out of step on this... But the way they are deployed most often is simply to give a jolt of horrible, mind bending pain so that people will instantly turn docile and cooperative --- at the sole discretion of the authority who wields it. Where does this eager subservience on the part of allegedly freedom loving Americans come from, that the population so willingly accepts that the police have right to make any of them feel "a hard punch in the stomach with the added trauma of electricity running through your body" whenever they feel the need? I can't wrap my mind around that.
Long story about a Colorado murder and the on-off investigation of Tim Masters who was convicted 12 years after the crime based on his "violent" drawings from a notebook he had kept as a teenager.
This business of being a sheep or a sheepdog is not a yes-no dichotomy. It is not an all-or-nothing, either-or choice. It is a matter of degrees, a continuum. On one end is an abject, head-in-the-grass sheep and on the other end is the ultimate warrior. F
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