You’d think that, with every public thing now being videotaped, the thug class would, at minimum, become more careful and cagey. Instead, they’re ramping up their violence and their sheer, bloody brazenness.
Good. This means they’re scared. (And scared of activists who are, after all, people who are still hopeful enough to ask Massah to relent just a tiny bit.) Bad. For the reasons expressed in Berwick’s headline.
Dan Brown’s got a new potboiler coming out. I like Dan Brown. I wish I could boil the pot like he does. Critics disagree. One says so in a familiar voice. :-)
Okay, so we’ve all heard about how the IRS illegally targeted tea party and related groups around the 2012 election. And they are so very, very sorry. And we’ve heard how they were actually targeting them for much longer than they originally admitted. And it’s no big news because the IRS has been a political tool since it was only the irs and hadn’t earned its capital letters yet, so you have to wonder what everyone’s getting so flapped about. What’s really mindboggling is that any reporter or editor could quote this with a straight face: “…the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias.” Wow. Orwell! Thou should’st be living at this hour.
Well, now we know what happens when police cordon off a neighborhood, declare it a Fourth-Amendment-free zone, send SWAT teams house-to-house, and hover helicopters overhead.
People cheer and applaud. They turn out in the streets to wave little American flags.
And next we can watch as they condone demand and slaver over illegal treatment of Suspect #2 (an American citizen). We can “enjoy” a new round of anti-immigrant and anti-Islam hatred. We can observe bobbleheads nodding from Los Angeles to Hartford as Good Citizens agree with all the new promises politicians and the state-security apparatus make as they concoct onerous new ways to “protect” us all.
Did you feel that coming right from the beginning? Right from the moment the sound of the explosions boomed across the media?
Even when the possibility still existed that the bombings were the work of some random crazy or some creep with a personal grudge, the media, police, and politicians from DC down (if you can go any farther down than DC) immediately went into “All of America has been attacked!” mode.
Contrast the reaction between the marathon bombings and the tragic explosion in Texas. Which killed more? Which leveled more buildings? Which killed paramedics and EMTs who had rushed to help? And which was treated like a afterthought?
I don’t mean to minimize or dismiss the suffering of the bomb victims. What hell they’re forced to endure! What a barbarity they were struck with. And of course, the Boston disaster was a vile crime and there’s no evidence (far as I know) of a crime at that Texas fertilizer plant.
But what an excuse the marathon bombs gave the media-police-politics complex. Now they’re free to lay the groundwork for another ramp-up of the Homeland (Achtung!) Security state. And are we going to be in for it.
Jim Bovard sent me this Salon article that sums up a big part of the problem: namely that we gave up freedom for the promise of security and (as you could have predicted), didn’t get security, either. The author comes from the left; he doesn’t seem to understand that the Second Amendment is our last bulwark against the permanent loss of all the others. But he’s nailed some of the big issues.
We’re all supposed to pretend that violence against masses of people is something new — that somehow the U.S. is under unprecedented attack that requires unprecedented (and certainly Draconian) central government crackdowns and surveillance. You know they’re coming — on top of the ones we already endure.
But we can only believe that if we’re a) big babies, b) hysterical drama queens, or c) completely ignorant of history. We’re supposed to forget that, clear back in 1955, some creepazoid blew up an airliner with 39 people on board. We’re supposed to pretend the Bath school disaster wasn’t perpetrated all the way back in 1927. And those weren’t even the first highly public bombings committed in this country.
Did the federal government concoct a security state over either of those horrors? No, because back then a few things still held government back. No, because back then the 24/7 propaganda-and-hysteria machine hadn’t been completely built yet. No, because back then, Americans didn’t wet their pants and quiver in the closet every time some moron with an agenda perpetrated evil somewhere in the country.
Oh, but now government and media know no restraints. Now we’re going to get it. Only question is: what exactly are we going to get this time?
Hey, if our children really belong to the state, or the “community” or whatever, doesn’t that mean everybody else ought to have to buy them their expensive sneakers and put up with them when they’re having a case of the raging hormones? Just — boom! — hand ‘em off to some random bureaucrat or neighbor for a while whenever they get a little out of hand. “Whaddaya mean, you won’t take Maddie Mae and Jacob? They’re your kids as much as they’re mine, aren’t they? Here! I’ll be back to get them when I darned well feel like it.”
Confiscation: And so it begins (in NY). I shudder when I hear friends say, “I’m for gun rights; but they should take guns from the mentally ill.” Be careful what you wish for.
I don’t know whether these parents really did anything to lose custody of their kids. But the more I read of this story, the more it sounds like 1992-3 all over again, when being “anti-government” was all the justification needed for killing parents and their kids. Fleeing to Cuba for freedom. That’s rich; I hope they find it. (H/T RC from comments)
Could cops end up on our side, after all? This largish poll on their attitudes about “gun control” sounds hopeful. (H/T JW from comments)
You’d think — you really would — that if you were in a place where a man had just shot a cop and the cops were setting up a siege (which would ultimately end with more shooting and a house going up in flames), you’d see immediately that something dangerous was going on. And you might logically take action to avoid the area.
But nope. Happens that a friend and I were driving down a street yesterday where a cop had just been shot. Squad cars were zooming in. Lights were flashing. Yada yada.
When my friend remarked, “Something big must be happening,” I shrugged, “Or they’re just busting another tweaker.” Because I’ve seen the surround-house-with-screaming-squad-cars routine repeatedly in my neighborhood. And that’s always what it is.
The last one I watched (before yesterday) was just across the street from my house. And (typically) the guy who got all that coply attention was a harmless neighbor who was back home the next day. He had just happened to fall victim to the latest spend-a-week-rounding-up-the-dopers-to-make-news-and-get-funding spree.
So my friend and I continued going about our business within sight of the siege and, frankly, I didn’t even pay attention to it when we came out of the store we were in, even though it was undoubtedly heating up at that moment.
Of course we and the other shoppers weren’t likely to have been in any danger (though the way some cops shoot, you never know). That’s not my point.
What struck me when I read the news this morning was how inured we we become to overkill. When we see masses of cops descending on a house, people getting thrown to the ground in a parking lot, or little girls getting their pubes poked at the airport we just think that’s the way it is. Ho hum. Life in the Land of the Free.
So not only do we become numbly accepting of what ought to be unacceptable, but when genuinely deadly danger is right in front of us, we might not recognize it because it looks so much like everyday overkill.
The following is a question I know we’ve all pondered. Yet in a way it’s imponderable. So we tend to come up with glib, macho, chest-thumping answers. Or we don’t answer at all because silence is the wiser choice. Still, it’s on a lot of minds.
Fourth question: At some point, political Intolerable Acts become truly, personally intolerable. The long train of abuses has to halt. We’ve already seen people (including perhaps ourselves) submit to more abuse in this generation than we’d ever have imagined. So a multi-parter:
1. Where does the train of abuses stop? 2. What actions by We the People are likely to stop it? 3. What are some of the practical issues in fighting tyranny head-on? 4. What are the ethical issues for people who don’t believe in initiating aggression?
Even as the armed individual remains the key to self and community defense, sophisticated societies inevitably develop specialization. It seems likely that even Libertopia would end up with a professional class of protectors, bounty hunters, or armed “insurance agents” (ala L. Neil Smith’s North American Confederacy).
Third question: In this or any other society, is it possible to ensure that armed, organized enforcers respect the rights of individuals and hold themselves to the fundamental rules of civil society? If so, what would put such a check on their behavior and prevent them from becoming tyrannical brutes serving powerful special interests?
