You may have seen this yesterday:
Former Rep. Ron Paul said the police response to the Boston Marathon bombings was scarier than the bombing itself, which killed three and wounded more than 250.But it seems, according to a MassINC Polling Group survey, that the good people of Massachusetts didn't notice they were being oppressed;
"The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city," Paul, a Texas Republican, wrote today on the website of the libertarian writer Lew Rockwell. "This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself."
Paul said the scenes of the house-to-house search for the younger bombing suspect in suburban Watertown, Mass., were reminiscent of a "military coup in a far off banana republic." ...
In the days after the arrest of the surviving Marathon bombing suspect, Massachusetts residents expressed a strongly positive impression of law enforcement and give their stamp of approve to the overall response to the attack. Ninety-one percent of respondents approved of the decision to lock down parts of the Greater Boston area while the second bombing suspect was at large on Friday, April 19, and 86 percent have a favorable opinion of the Massachusetts State Police.I know, I know: a lot of sensible people agree with Ron Paul that the lockdown was excessive. But it was limited, and it was focused on a goal the populace shared. Nobody was tossed in a gulag.
In the wake of the bombings, the public expressed more concern about public safety than the potential for restrictions on civil liberties. Nearly half (48 percent) said they are more concerned the government will not go far enough to investigate and prevent terrorism while 36 percent were more concerned civil liberties could be infringed....
Oh, and a lockdown probably didn't seem very different from the shutdown of the region, including suspension of public transportation, that took place two months earlier during a big blizzard.
And, yeah, the cops didn't find the guy -- though he was frozen in place, in a town crawling with cops, which may have helped bring the manhunt to an end a lot sooner.
You know why Massachusetts residents didn't feel oppressed by this? Because they think they and the cops were on the same side. The cops were acting in the interests of the people. They were seen as part of society, not as a malignancy sapping a free society's health. Believe me, you hear plenty of people grumbling about the government in Massachusetts, but people generally don't believe that government shouldn't exist. They resent government when it's ineffective, and unresponsive to people's needs. This didn't fall into that category. The cops were making hat seemed to be a reasonable judgment about how to keep the populace safe. So, yes, Massachusetts residents approved.
(Poll via Opinion Today.)
I'm mortally sick of these evil paranoid imbeciles.
ReplyDeleteAnd while I thought at the time that shutting down Boston and sorrounding towns was excessive, I was much less inclined to think that way when I found out that the MA Governor asked people to stay home, and didn't ORDER them to - and that most did.
They didn't think that if they went out and bought an AR-15, or pulled one out of its hiding spot, and went and grabbed their tons of ammo clips and started prowling the streets like 21st Century, up-armed Minute Men, that they'd be much of a help to all of the well-trained police out there doing their jobs.
While these idiot's are out there freaking-out about their 2nd Amendment Rights, they're been pretty sanguine about the gutting of pretty much most of the rest of the original ones, in the last 40+ years.
Or, am I a SocialistFascistCommie for pointing that out?
One more time... with feeling: the fundemental difference between Fascism and Socialism lay is simply rearranging the words.
ReplyDeleteWith Fascism (Corporatism) the Corpoation, the means of production, controls the State, controls the means of distribution.
In Socialism (Communism) the State, the means of distribution... control the Corporation, controls the means of production.
Hope that helps Vic, but you know, like alcoholism, drug addiction and religion, only you can answer that question;-) I agree though, no surprise that as I have long maintained here and elsewhere they are cowards. Are candy asses, cun/s. I oft beg them to step outside, but to no avail. On The Rez we call it selling wolf tickets: talking a tough talk but hiding on the swamp when shit hits the fan.
I drive an old one-ton Ford pickup, sensible tires, accessable toolbox, gunrack and a Goat Ropers Need Love Too sticker. Not jacked up (I'm shrinking, but more on that later), not de-engineered, no tires the size of Volkswagons, no hood icon the perfect rendition of the human female reproductive system. In that gunrack often is the well worn deer rifle I've had near forty years. A lever action revolving rifle, "holds" six rounds. If ypou can't get it with six rounds... well, I sure as hell can. So too the pistol on the seat, though with only five rounds. It's always a good idea to keep the hammer on an empty chamber, wouldn't to shoot yourself in the leg, or the horse out from under you. And if can't shoot the rattlesnake with five rounds before it spooks the horse you're fucked. Which brings us to...
I've been dating a couple of hot near sixty year olds for a couple of years now and they are both quite happy with - indeed, my doctor, bless her heart, had me blushing recently commenting on - the redistribution of mass going on as my back continues to collapse and the rest of me gets smaller.
No fear. A lot of pain but, no fear.
Ten Bears,
ReplyDeleteOh, I'm well aware of what each of those terms mean.
I just use that scrunched together term to show how the ignorant masses on the right interchangeably throw around terms that they don't know the meaning of.
Repeat as needed: "Not a lockdown, a request to aid the police by staying out of the way."
ReplyDeleteI can't believe how many people think it would have been easy to catch these guys in a city filled with people rushing in to work that morning. Hindsight is 20/20 but people with hindsight ought to have a grasp of the difference between knowing for sure that the last remaining bomber is an injured 19 year old loser and not knowing for sure whether the rest of the city had been booby trapped by other parts of a gang of presumably slightly smarter terrorists.
I think all this right wing faux after action reporting is a sign that they've given up on their other favorite trope: Obama and Deval Patrick are wusses who are covering up complicity with a HUGE islamic bombing plot. They are secretely and seamlessly flipping to a different section of the right wing reactionary manual: insisting that this is fascistic government overreach because the bomber boys were just regular home grown nutcases.
What it boils down to is humpty dumpty's refrain: words mean what I want them to mean. Its fascism when the state's might might fall on white people and its failed state communism when the full force of the state fails to come down on a presumed muslim enemy. Its patriotic for Boston to shut down if it shows that we are part of the right wing war on all things muslim--but its unpatriotic and cowardly for Boston to shut down and inconvenience white people if we can't even make the remaining bomber a good target of right wing hate.
Civil libertarians and people concerned to avert "Islamophobia" have been protesting the extremity of these measures for days.
ReplyDeleteDo you agree with the protests when they come from people on the left, but not when they come from the right?
When has the "right" protested Islamaphobia?
ReplyDeleteNo fear.
It's always a good idea to keep the hammer on an empty chamber, wouldn't to shoot yourself in the leg, or the horse out from under you.
ReplyDeleteThat's an old Chinese Triad or "Tong" trick, that way you're not stampeded into shooting someone/something prematurely.
No fear.
Indeed.
“He is speaking to the Anti-Defamation League, which is a group that fights anti-Semitism and he is lecturing that group on how they can’t be bigoted, and we can’t be ignorant, and we can’t have a backlash against Muslims,” Kelly said. “I mean, the context could be perceived by some to be somewhat offensive, that the Attorney General is perceiving the folks in front of him or others in this country are now getting ready to put on their bigoted clothes and go out there and exercise their ignorance as opposed to expressing outrage at the fact that we were attacked by two guys who apparently are followers of radical Islam.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/29/fox-news-host-denouncing-violence-against-muslims-could-be-perceived-as-offensive/
Concern trolling on Faux News, we report, you decide.
Civil libertarians and people concerned to avert "Islamophobia" have been protesting the extremity of these measures for days.
ReplyDeleteDo you agree with the protests when they come from people on the left, but not when they come from the right?
I don't agree with the protesters, period. This doesn't outrage me.
Steve M,
ReplyDeleteAs someone who cut his teeth on some of legendary "'tests" of the late 60/70's, I couldn't agree more.
That doesn't mean I don't feel for their causes.
I'd make the observation that today most protests tend to be partisan and exclusionary rather than inclusionary.
e.g. feminism is about female's right compare that to MLK Jr was about Human Rights,
His famous dictums reflect that.
"there will be racism in this country until you can meet a person for the first time and ten minutes later not remember what color they were." (not... if they were Black or white.).
In short I disagree with the methodology not necessary the issue at hand.
I would note that among the causal factors for this shift in public consciousness is the deliberate desensitising to the real meanings of words as alluded to by Ten Bears.
Have no doubt that it's a deliberate tactic of spin in particular commercial advertising.
The less nuanced the language becomes the more space there is for faux and misinterpretation.
Yes! It is desensitizing through Goebbel's repetition of a lie. And we are fostering that through making fun of their ignorance. I wasn't chastizing Vic (well, ok, maybe a little), the difference is so nuanced it is very easy to blur the distinction in those who for whatever reason just don't get it. And I have spent enough time down through the years studying history not rewritten by those in a position to get away with it to have no doubt those at the decision making level are well aware of it.
ReplyDeleteThe Fourth Reich, the Corporatists, are well aware of the stain of Corporatism, of Fascism. Goebbel's Dictum was more than just the lie, it was/is projectionism - the White Christian Nationalists (NAZIs) campaign to project their evil onto their opposition - in every form we see it today. I chastize us all, I am as guilty of making fun of the dumb fucks as the next, as when we do we are participating in that desensitizing, that blurring of the distinction we decry.
No fear.