Showing posts with label police. Show all posts
Showing posts with label police. Show all posts

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Do "The police exist to maintain the divide between the upper class and everyone else. Nothing more." ?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



You can't blame some citizens for considering the overall validity of the title conjecture, given our current context.

I wonder how long it takes, on average, for the average local cop on the beat - fresh out of a police academy - to become aware of, let alone come to grips with, the default institutional lobbying that comes from perennial class competition, whether overt or "Innocent Fraud".

With current education practices, the bulk of our citizens seem to remain politically naive for most of their lives, so there's no reason to expect the bulk of police officers to catch on much faster, if ever.

Progress requires much more organizational effort to get all citizens on the same page, and realizing that we're all in this together.

There's so much to gain from social coordination (teamwork), and each year we've less to lose.

Meanwhile, it's still true that adversarial approaches are unlikely to work. In fact, they'll play into classic methods for confusing, dividing & conquering electorates by default, i.e., narrow business lobbies & politics as usual. Here's yet another example.

How FBI Illegally Stole Ross Ulbricht's Laptop & Brought Down The Silk Road

In response, a contact wrote:
"The police exist to maintain the divide between the upper class and everyone else. Nothing more."
I'm not the only one wondering why the FBI action against Ross Ulbricht & Silk Road was such a priority.

Especially given persistent unemployment levels, student loan debt, poor K-12 schools*, white collar crime, blue collar crime, etc, etc.

Not to mention money laundering & other financial terrorism by Wall St. banks

   ----



* Compare schools today with Sam Adam's early education, 200+ years ago. Read it and weep.
"Sam Adams, like five of the fifty-six signers of the Declarations of Independence, attended Boston Latin School [at ~age 7]. Required reading at the Boston Latin School for a student's first four years included Aesop's Fables, one of the first of which is a tale of a wolf who devoured a lamb despite the lamb's refutation of all the wolf's accusations against him. The moral of the story, according to Aesop, is that 'The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.' ...

In years five through seven of the school, students progressed to reading letters, essays and orations of the Roman politician Marcus Tullius Cicero.  ...
 
[Subsequently,] Sam Adams entered Harvard in 1736 at age 14." 

Which was normal for that day, at least for motivated families in and around Boston. So why isn't a similar educational rate "normal" today? After all, a human mind is a terrible thing to waste, and so is a national group mind.



Monday, December 29, 2014

My podcast for Dec 29.

My podcast for today.

Forex trading. Police insubordination. The weakness of liberals and progressives. Obama's love of neoliberalism.


Podcast for Dec 29.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Living in the American police state

Very scary.

Turning America Into a War Zone, Where ‘We the People’ Are the Enemy  
By John W. Whitehead
August 21, 2014  

“If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.”—Sunil Dutta, an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department for 17 years 

Life in the American police state is an endless series of don’ts delivered at the end of a loaded gun: don’t talk back to police officers, don’t even think about defending yourself against a SWAT team raid (of which there are 80,000 every year), don’t run when a cop is nearby lest you be mistaken for a fleeing criminal, don’t carry a cane lest it be mistaken for a gun, don’t expect privacy in public, don’t let your kids walk to the playground alone, don’t engage in nonviolent protest near where a government official might pass, don’t try to grow vegetables in your front yard, don’t play music for tips in a metro station, don’t feed whales, and on and on.

For those who resist, who dare to act independently, think for themselves, march to the beat of a different drummer, the consequences are invariably a one-way trip to the local jail or death.
What Americans must understand, what we have chosen to ignore, what we have fearfully turned a blind eye to lest the reality prove too jarring is the fact that we no longer live in the “city on the hill,” a beacon of freedom for all the world.

Monday, August 18, 2014

John McDuling — Investors predict more cops in the US will soon be wearing cameras

Because Ferguson
Quartz
Investors predict more cops in the US will soon be wearing cameras
John McDuling
According to Taser’s marketing materials, a Cambridge University study of the technology found an 88% reduction in citizen complaints and a 60% reduction in use of force when its wearable camera system is implemented. So weirdly, Taser could actually help reduce violence.
But police are resistant.