Welcome to America. America hates Islamic terrorists both foreign and domestic for obvious reasons.Originally Posted by The Rani
- Join Date
- Sep 2012
- Posts
- 1,789
Welcome to America. America hates Islamic terrorists both foreign and domestic for obvious reasons.
America hates in general, just on principle. It's not one of our better qualities.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch
"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy
"[it] is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky
Well it's never too late for a suspect to "choke" on his breathing tube. That said, there are many powerful folks out there who recognize the importance of a good heel when pushing a storyline.
But what about the War On Guns/Colored People? Where 34% of all inmates serving time on drug charges are "of color," more like 94% of those serving time on gun charges are.
And if Tsarnaev The Younger has watched shows like COPS, he could recite his Miranda rights in his sleep - so not reading them to him once he wakes up is no big issue.
At least we won't have to hear the neocons saying that Russia is our #1 enemy anymore!
And Peter King's piling onto this still won't save him from getting primaried by a teabagger next year.
But maybe if the putative Robin Hoods stopped trying to take from law-abiding citizens and give to criminals, take from men and give to women, take from believers and give to anti-believers, take from citizens and give to "undocumented" immigrants, and take from heterosexuals and give to homosexuals, they might have a lot more success in taking from the rich and giving to everyone else.
Don't blame me - I'm a Baby Buster!
I think mentally, we maintain a fiction that terrorism is ideological, but mass shootings are not. Most people consider mass shootings or even bombings as a manifestation of mental illness. So, terrorism is unforgivable, but other mass killings are merely tragic.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
I'm shocked that, in this day and age, a major metropolitan police force isn't using encryption ... making scanners useless.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
As a general comment: we are becoming more authoritarian, because that's the way we want it to be. At least that's true for the voting majority - the only ones who count in politics. That this is far from new is beside the point. We, the collective 'we', seem to like it just the way it is. We believe, wrongly, that ever more security leads to less risk, much like the idea that national austerity leads to wealth. These are visceral ideas, and they don't yield an inch to reason.
So we can discuss this all we want, but nothing will change until some event or series of events finally triggers it. Do we need to see another assassinated President? Would 10,000 dying in a massive bombing of a major sports event do the trick? My speculation is no. These things, should they occur, will make it worse. Out there in time, there may be an event that will, but more likely, a continuous grinding of the nation into a dystopia will finally cross a currently invisible line, and trigger mass blowback.
Grinding away at the patience of the people is a slow process. Does anyone think this can happen inside the current 4T? As it stands, there is virtually no effective opposition. Authoritarians are running the show in both parties, and outside opposition is pathetic – OWS being a perfect example.
So expect the current trend to continue, at least through the 1T.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
They go silent when they go on a raid. "Collision at US 37 and Hamilton Road" is nothing to hide. Neither is "Shoplifter at Wal*Mart -- assist store security". "Meth lab going down tonight" requires secrecy until it is completed. Police scanners are news sources for "If it bleeds it leads" News at 6.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
That's an excellent point!
"The only Good America is a Just America." .... pbrower2a
Thanks for posting this. I was especially impressed by the summary:
But consider this irony: We treat child killers here in the U.S. with more care than we treat children in Afghanistan and other war zones. We excuse the killing of civilians by U.S. troops by saying that in war bad things happen–as if war is like a plague or natural disaster, for which we are not responsible. Killing innocent people is inexcusable, whether they live in Boston or in Afghanistan. Terrorists and criminals and deranged maniacs kill civilians. A civilized nation doesn’t. Or shouldn’t. Ever.
"The only Good America is a Just America." .... pbrower2a
Easy. Because we (as a group; individually, lots of us rock) are not a good people.
It’s not an intrinsic evil; we weren’t born evil, or at least not in this particular way. Nor is it a consciously, freely-chosen evil: I am determined to prove a villain, as old Dick Crookback observes somewhere. No, it’s a path-of-least-resistance evil; and really, nobody can be blamed for taking that path....
...We’re a bad bunch, we Amurricans, in many ways. Most of all, we’ve been compromised by our buy-in to the imperial idea.
The kill-em-all crowd are a small, particularly crazed minority; most of us would want to stop short of that — maybe it would suffice just to decimate them all. The Lesser Evil!
But I think we all have that brain-bug in our heads. It’s almost an everyday incident to meet some personable, kind, even heroic American individual — somebody who’s supporting a Down syndrome kid and a mom with Alzheimer’s, and who still somehow finds a way to walk the world with a smile on his face and a ready capacity for companionable mirth.
But when the conversation turns, in spite of all your efforts, to the towelheads — then the evil comes out. It’s not usually ‘kill ‘em all’ — not quite — but the killer impulse is distinctly present...
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch
"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy
"[it] is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky
While much of what you say is utterly true, there is also the fact that none of us are born to be prejudice in regards to a race or gender. We are, in some ways, taught how to hate and to see some others as less than ourselves. Empire and religion have taught us to view ourselves as the chosen people.
"The only Good America is a Just America." .... pbrower2a
Are we intentionally targeting civilian populations?
High explosives are, if a weasel insists on trying to slip out from under the term 'intentional', at least 'grossly negligent'. And whereas a single instance of gross negligence is one thing, a policy of sustained gross negligence indeed returns us comfortably back under the umbrella of intent.*
So yes. The answer to your question is yes. Clearly so.
Yes.
-----
*skipping here the fact that destruction of infrastructure and other various attempts to starve or squeeze populations into compliance are themselves very clear and direct targeting of civilian populations. Skipping mainly because I'm sure that's not what you were talking about...
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch
"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy
"[it] is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky
Would you prefer that we become a nation of pansies and pushovers who are more easily controlled?
Entire regions are being terrorized by our drones.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz2R7gt4uP7Just one in 50 victims of America’s deadly drone strikes in Pakistan are terrorists – while the rest are innocent civilians, a new report claimed today.
The authoritative joint study, by Stanford and New York Universities, concludes that men, women and children are being terrorized by the operations ’24 hours-a-day’.
And the authors lay much of the blame on the use of the ‘double-tap’ strike where a drone fires one missile – and then a second as rescuers try to drag victims from the rubble. One aid agency said they had a six-hour delay before going to the scene.
The tactic has cast such a shadow of fear over strike zones that people often wait for hours before daring to visit the scene of an attack. Investigators also discovered that communities living in fear of the drones were suffering severe stress and related illnesses. Many parents had taken their children out of school because they were so afraid of a missile-strike.
"The only Good America is a Just America." .... pbrower2a
We accept responsibility for accidently killing civilians with our bombs.
Entire regions are under the control and the threat of Islamic terrorism.
I wish that was true.
As Stephen Colbert put it,
"The administration has developed a brilliant system of ensuring that those building engulfing explosions don't kill non-combatants: they just count all military age males in a strike zone as combatants...This isn't just the president executing innocent people around the world by fiat, there is an appeals process. The men are considered terrorists unless 'there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent,' in which case, I assume, there is a legal process that un-kills them."
"The only Good America is a Just America." .... pbrower2a
"My Bad!! It's cool everybody, I said My Bad!!"
Who is "we" and what consequences does this we face?
"Sorry we vaporized most of your family trying to kill your crazy uncle Dave, but if you get angry or try to retaliate for it we promise to finish off the rest of your family, neener neener?"
Does that sound like “accepting responsibility”? Our douchebag-in-chief won a peace prize for doing this shit. A peace prize.
Last edited by Copperfield; 04-21-2013 at 04:35 PM.
No you don't.
Responsibility for a negligent homicide (granting you the most absolutely lenient and charitable interpretation for the policy of throwing explosives around where people are) involves at minimum a stint in a locked jail cell. I'd ask you to point to me which person has sat in which cell to accept responsibility for even the deaths from one of the many many hundreds of such incidents. Except that such a request is ludicrous. Neither captains nor pilots nor gunners nor janitors on the Death Star are even remotely held responsible for the deaths on Alderan. That's why it's the Death Star.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch
"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy
"[it] is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky
Tons of places are, but there's tons of apps and programs that negate the encryption. For a while, it was going pretty well, but with the proliferation of smart phones and the dedication of people who want to hear it, it's easily broken.
For the most part, it really doesn't matter, there are so many channels trunked into one station in any reasonably sized agency, that finding which channel has time sensitive information on it is pretty difficult and without location the appropriate channel, their transmissions get stomped over by routine traffic.
The real downside is that a lot of major agencies have gone plain language to increase interoperability between jurisdictions, and so immediate, personally sensative, information goes over the air and can be heard by anyone on main channels. So things people'd more or less like to keep private (say rectal bleeding or rape), are just broadcast for your nosey neighbor to know.
If don't think we do, because we keep doing it.
As I recall, the Death Star and it's captains, it's pilots, it's gunners, it's stormtroopers and it's various staff of non-combatants were eventually blown up with a couple of bombs that were released by Luke Skywalker.
