COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Miriam Carey update

Congress cheered the cops that shot and killed Miriam Carey. 

For some time I have been concerned about the militarization of the police and  the collapse of common sense over the entire issue of domestic security.

My suspicion is that there was overreaction by the police to a woman that panicked. Two cops involved in the shooting have been removed from street duty. That could be routine SOP or an indication of something more. Whatever the outcome, there is nothing to cheer about.



6 comments:

  1. It's a hard call. She unfortunately chose the most sensitive place in the entire country to go a little haywire.

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    1. But I do think the police were at fault. Her car was stopped, was it not, at the time of the shooting? And at that point she seemed to be making no threatening gestures etc.

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    2. No it's not a 'hard call' at all. It's an easy call. It's called an arrest. And somehow millions of police around the world seem to manage to do it every day to far more dangerous people without killing them. What is this 'sensitive place'. Does the rule of law apply, or not? Clearly it doesn't anymore in the US.

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  2. US military policy since Lincoln's General Sherman who pronounced it as:

    "extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people" ....

    Sherman elsewhere declared "We are not fighting against enemy armies, but against an enemy people, both young and old, rich and poor, and they must feel the iron hand of war in the same way as organized armies."

    Around 1902 in another attempt to "clean" for "world order"

    US General Jacob H. Smith tells the commanding officer of the Marines assigned to clean up the island of Samar, Philippines:

    "I want no prisoners.

    I wish you to kill and burn;

    the more you kill and burn the better it will please me."

    He orders that the entire island of Samar be converted into a "howling wilderness." He specifically orders that all males over the age of ten are to be shot. Step one is to burn the town of Balangiga to the ground.


    This is what the US has done to the Indians, Germany, Japan, Viet Nam, Panama, Fallujah, Libya, Yugoslavia, Korea, Syria and many other places, yes?

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