America does not have a police state. Yet. East Germany had a police state. Syria has a police state. In police states, the government is afraid of the people. Our government is not all that afraid of us. Despite the liberal paranoia about militias and assault rifles, the training drills and TV shows where survivalists overrun the country, the people in charge don't wake up every morning worrying about a revolution. If they did, then two people in your neighborhood would be informing on you weekly.
We don't have militarized police forces, TSA agents and NSA eavesdropping because the government is afraid of us, but because the government's policies have made life unlivable without them. The KGB wasn't there to protect Russians from each other. Our police state is. And those parts of it that aren't fly under the radar every time the Chicago death toll for the year appears on the evening news.
The police escalation that shows up on countless videos exists because the people demanded it. And the people demanded it because liberal social policies made entire cities unlivable. The militarized police forces out of cities like Los Angeles filtered down to the suburbs and the rural areas as the same policies and populations that made cities unlivable began spreading outward.
The police state, associated with the right, worked in tandem with the social policies of the left, to dull the pain of those policies. That "dulling" has become the new role of conservative politicians in America who manage the disaster instead of rolling it back. The left realized that without the police state, its policies faced a much broader level of rejection so it learned to tolerate the pigs and the man.
Urban areas were still a disaster, but relentless computerized policing reduced crime enough to make it appear that things had improved. The visible crime statistics however were only the symptoms of the problem. The left had been right about that. It was just wrong about the cause. It was the cause all along. Its social policies had created social problems that the police state managed.
Having armed goons patrol the streets made cities viable again. And that brought in the tax base which allowed the left to experiment with more of the same social policies. The Giulianis made it safe for the Bloombergs and then the De Blasios to come back. In the same way Bush's war policies paved the way for the Obama years by dulling the pain of international terrorism.
The international manifestations of the police state dulled the impact of Islamic terrorism without addressing the cause. The cause was not, as the left and some libertarians believed, foreign policy, but immigration. The collision of populations and ideologies led to September 11 using the very planes that made international immigration so easy as weapons.
The War on Terror with its spectacle of targeted drone strikes slowed down the terrorists without addressing the real problem, dulling the pain so that no one would pay too much attention to the next planeload of Pakistanis, Syrians or Somalis showing up in America.
It's tempting to connect the two, to assume that the social policies are there to enable the police state, but the people behind one or the other are two arms that can't find each other. The class warriors can't conceive that their enthusiasm for cultural breakdowns and economic depression somehow causes crime and the law and order types can't grasp that all they're doing is making it easier for the people responsible for the mess to make it worse. And even if they do; what other options are out there?
We've become very good at symptom management and at not thinking about the underlying problem. Our medical establishment turns out high tech symptom management medications that let you go on living your life and canoeing or mountain climbing in drug commercials and our law enforcement, security and military establishments are good at their own high tech symptom management whether it's drones, surveillance or computerized tracking of all offenses in a given area.
The Republicans are aware that problems don't really get solved, but they are unwilling to deal with the causes. The sad state of the mainstream right is that it believes in holding the line, in managing the symptoms, and when the line is pushed back, it has no answers and no solutions. The left has plenty of solutions, but they are the same solutions that cause the problems.
What we have is a problem of failed societies, both at home and abroad. Some of these societies encompass entire countries while others are limited to a city or a neighborhood. In these places the social contract has broken down. The only thing that keeps the people living in them from killing each other is the threat of naked force, the vendetta and the lynch mob and honor and shame.
The right tackles failed societies with 70 percent policing to 30 percent welfare while the left goes with a 70 percent welfare to 30 percent policing mix. There's a fundamental difference in consequences with a 70 percent welfare mix being unlivable and a 70 percent policing mix being manageable so long as you don't mind losing your civil liberties when you get caught up at the wrong time and place.
But the differences in philosophy are less profound. The right is forced to accept the necessity of the welfare state and the left has to accept the police state. Republicans have to hand out free stuff and Democrats have to drone. It's the emphasis in priorities that makes Democrats different from Republicans. It's the distinction that they make between ends and means that explains why they are so much alike until they get too close to having unchallenged power with no one to stop them.
The left tries to "save" the people of failed societies by taking care of them and tries to appease them by minimizing resistance. The more they are taken care of, the less they take care of themselves and the more entitled they become. The more they are appeased in response to violence, the more violent they become. Eventually this cycle hits a peak which requires police or military intervention. If the intervention is successful, the cycle is dampened, the right declares victory and the left agonizes. If it is not successful, then the left declares victory and mixes its existing policies together with some version of the police state. Either way the cycle continues and the problem resurfaces.
Since we can't address the problem, we instead blindly address the symptoms. The TSA gropes everyone. The NSA listens in on everyone. The police treat everyone like a potential spree killer. Every school has to be locked down and put on zero tolerance. Every cop is following a script that leads to a taser at best and a bullet at worst. Everyone has a plan for killing everyone else.
That's not the traditional police state. The cops aren't the Superego, they're the Id, doing the dirty work that no one wants to talk about so that we can go on pretending that everything is alright. While society pretends that everything is working, those with the guns know that nothing works and lose faith in the system and in society. The people we pay to protect us from failed societies take on some of the aspects of failed societies, looking into the abyss and seeing the abyss inside themselves.
If the cycle continues, then at some point our state of police may become a police state, but that's not the likeliest option anymore. Police states work with people who generally behave themselves. They are good tools for dealing with the middle class. They're not much good for people with no sense of consequences or concern for the future whose life is shaped by magical thinking.
In the United States, it's not the populations that drift in and out of jail who find the police terrifying, but those who don't. There is no police state for the former. The middle class citizen looks warily through the window of his home like the bars of a cage but when the cop car drives through a bad neighborhood, it's the police officers inside who feel like they are in a cage. The police state is about control and our state of police exists to control the areas that are becoming uncontrollable.
The same problem exists internationally. American diplomats can bully the UK over the EU or intimidate Israel into releasing terrorists, but they can't do much to Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Palestinian Authority. There's only one thing you can do to people who don't care about what happens next because they don't think in terms of consequences and live for little else except conflict.
And so eventually the middle class people and the middle class countries get tired of policing bad neighborhoods and bad countries and retreat to their own little zones of security policed by increasingly ruthless tactics as the violence outside grows and the walls begin coming down. And then it's Rome and the barbarians all over again.
The police state and the welfare state aren't answers, they're denials of reality.
The left can't fix the social problems that, in some cases its welfare state helped cause. It certainly can't fix those that predate its intervention. Its efforts are all the more hopeless because it attributes the cause to its usual suspects of capitalism and intolerance so that it never addresses the problems, instead it uses people from failed societies as ammo in a cultural war. The right's tactics temporarily contain the worst of the violence, but not its expansion or its causes.
The very problem with a police state is its mechanical blindness, its fear of offending anyone or singling anyone out that it resolves with wholesale intimidation. Oppressing everyone to avoid oppressing anyone is the egalitarian ethos gone mad. Police states deal in random terror to intimidate everyone. Our state of police deals in random terror because that way everyone is equal.
But the problems that brought this state of police into being are not evenly distributed. And a solution whose distribution ignores the distribution of the problem cannot succeed. Our police state has been brought about by a collision of cultures. The police state and the welfare state attempt to manage that collision without acknowledging it.
The domestic police state would be far less necessary if we stopped importing the populations who are most likely to be in need of it and the same goes for the domestic welfare state. Internationally we can scrap the welfare state and concentrate our firepower on larger threats rather than chasing down every goat herder with an RPG in the name of stabilizing another failed society that will stabilize.
We don't have militarized police forces, TSA agents and NSA eavesdropping because the government is afraid of us, but because the government's policies have made life unlivable without them. The KGB wasn't there to protect Russians from each other. Our police state is. And those parts of it that aren't fly under the radar every time the Chicago death toll for the year appears on the evening news.The police escalation that shows up on countless videos exists because the people demanded it. And the people demanded it because liberal social policies made entire cities unlivable. The militarized police forces out of cities like Los Angeles filtered down to the suburbs and the rural areas as the same policies and populations that made cities unlivable began spreading outward.
The police state, associated with the right, worked in tandem with the social policies of the left, to dull the pain of those policies. That "dulling" has become the new role of conservative politicians in America who manage the disaster instead of rolling it back. The left realized that without the police state, its policies faced a much broader level of rejection so it learned to tolerate the pigs and the man.
Urban areas were still a disaster, but relentless computerized policing reduced crime enough to make it appear that things had improved. The visible crime statistics however were only the symptoms of the problem. The left had been right about that. It was just wrong about the cause. It was the cause all along. Its social policies had created social problems that the police state managed.
Having armed goons patrol the streets made cities viable again. And that brought in the tax base which allowed the left to experiment with more of the same social policies. The Giulianis made it safe for the Bloombergs and then the De Blasios to come back. In the same way Bush's war policies paved the way for the Obama years by dulling the pain of international terrorism.
The international manifestations of the police state dulled the impact of Islamic terrorism without addressing the cause. The cause was not, as the left and some libertarians believed, foreign policy, but immigration. The collision of populations and ideologies led to September 11 using the very planes that made international immigration so easy as weapons.
The War on Terror with its spectacle of targeted drone strikes slowed down the terrorists without addressing the real problem, dulling the pain so that no one would pay too much attention to the next planeload of Pakistanis, Syrians or Somalis showing up in America.
It's tempting to connect the two, to assume that the social policies are there to enable the police state, but the people behind one or the other are two arms that can't find each other. The class warriors can't conceive that their enthusiasm for cultural breakdowns and economic depression somehow causes crime and the law and order types can't grasp that all they're doing is making it easier for the people responsible for the mess to make it worse. And even if they do; what other options are out there?
We've become very good at symptom management and at not thinking about the underlying problem. Our medical establishment turns out high tech symptom management medications that let you go on living your life and canoeing or mountain climbing in drug commercials and our law enforcement, security and military establishments are good at their own high tech symptom management whether it's drones, surveillance or computerized tracking of all offenses in a given area.
The Republicans are aware that problems don't really get solved, but they are unwilling to deal with the causes. The sad state of the mainstream right is that it believes in holding the line, in managing the symptoms, and when the line is pushed back, it has no answers and no solutions. The left has plenty of solutions, but they are the same solutions that cause the problems.
What we have is a problem of failed societies, both at home and abroad. Some of these societies encompass entire countries while others are limited to a city or a neighborhood. In these places the social contract has broken down. The only thing that keeps the people living in them from killing each other is the threat of naked force, the vendetta and the lynch mob and honor and shame.The right tackles failed societies with 70 percent policing to 30 percent welfare while the left goes with a 70 percent welfare to 30 percent policing mix. There's a fundamental difference in consequences with a 70 percent welfare mix being unlivable and a 70 percent policing mix being manageable so long as you don't mind losing your civil liberties when you get caught up at the wrong time and place.
But the differences in philosophy are less profound. The right is forced to accept the necessity of the welfare state and the left has to accept the police state. Republicans have to hand out free stuff and Democrats have to drone. It's the emphasis in priorities that makes Democrats different from Republicans. It's the distinction that they make between ends and means that explains why they are so much alike until they get too close to having unchallenged power with no one to stop them.
The left tries to "save" the people of failed societies by taking care of them and tries to appease them by minimizing resistance. The more they are taken care of, the less they take care of themselves and the more entitled they become. The more they are appeased in response to violence, the more violent they become. Eventually this cycle hits a peak which requires police or military intervention. If the intervention is successful, the cycle is dampened, the right declares victory and the left agonizes. If it is not successful, then the left declares victory and mixes its existing policies together with some version of the police state. Either way the cycle continues and the problem resurfaces.
Since we can't address the problem, we instead blindly address the symptoms. The TSA gropes everyone. The NSA listens in on everyone. The police treat everyone like a potential spree killer. Every school has to be locked down and put on zero tolerance. Every cop is following a script that leads to a taser at best and a bullet at worst. Everyone has a plan for killing everyone else.
That's not the traditional police state. The cops aren't the Superego, they're the Id, doing the dirty work that no one wants to talk about so that we can go on pretending that everything is alright. While society pretends that everything is working, those with the guns know that nothing works and lose faith in the system and in society. The people we pay to protect us from failed societies take on some of the aspects of failed societies, looking into the abyss and seeing the abyss inside themselves.
If the cycle continues, then at some point our state of police may become a police state, but that's not the likeliest option anymore. Police states work with people who generally behave themselves. They are good tools for dealing with the middle class. They're not much good for people with no sense of consequences or concern for the future whose life is shaped by magical thinking.
In the United States, it's not the populations that drift in and out of jail who find the police terrifying, but those who don't. There is no police state for the former. The middle class citizen looks warily through the window of his home like the bars of a cage but when the cop car drives through a bad neighborhood, it's the police officers inside who feel like they are in a cage. The police state is about control and our state of police exists to control the areas that are becoming uncontrollable.
The same problem exists internationally. American diplomats can bully the UK over the EU or intimidate Israel into releasing terrorists, but they can't do much to Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Palestinian Authority. There's only one thing you can do to people who don't care about what happens next because they don't think in terms of consequences and live for little else except conflict.
And so eventually the middle class people and the middle class countries get tired of policing bad neighborhoods and bad countries and retreat to their own little zones of security policed by increasingly ruthless tactics as the violence outside grows and the walls begin coming down. And then it's Rome and the barbarians all over again.
The police state and the welfare state aren't answers, they're denials of reality.The left can't fix the social problems that, in some cases its welfare state helped cause. It certainly can't fix those that predate its intervention. Its efforts are all the more hopeless because it attributes the cause to its usual suspects of capitalism and intolerance so that it never addresses the problems, instead it uses people from failed societies as ammo in a cultural war. The right's tactics temporarily contain the worst of the violence, but not its expansion or its causes.
The very problem with a police state is its mechanical blindness, its fear of offending anyone or singling anyone out that it resolves with wholesale intimidation. Oppressing everyone to avoid oppressing anyone is the egalitarian ethos gone mad. Police states deal in random terror to intimidate everyone. Our state of police deals in random terror because that way everyone is equal.
But the problems that brought this state of police into being are not evenly distributed. And a solution whose distribution ignores the distribution of the problem cannot succeed. Our police state has been brought about by a collision of cultures. The police state and the welfare state attempt to manage that collision without acknowledging it.
The domestic police state would be far less necessary if we stopped importing the populations who are most likely to be in need of it and the same goes for the domestic welfare state. Internationally we can scrap the welfare state and concentrate our firepower on larger threats rather than chasing down every goat herder with an RPG in the name of stabilizing another failed society that will stabilize.
Comments
Make no mistake, the NSA programs on domestic "data gathering" are a mother's milk of any totalitarian state. You do not need Stasi 2.0 to have a totalitarian state, but you can not even pretend that when you have Stasi 2.0 you do not have a totalitarian state. What we do not have yet are the armed goons at our doors, but we are well past incipient stage of totalitarian government, so goons are coming. Orders for "training" ammo, in quantities unfathomable to anyone but military force involved in a conflict of the size of a world war, are being placed almost daily. This is just one random observation... there are many more....
ReplyDelete"Oppressing everyone to avoid oppressing anyone is the egalitarian ethos gone mad." That is good, really good.
ReplyDeleteMr. Greenfield, incandescent thinking as always. Your ideas seems to be based on an appreciation of symmetry and asymmetry, in the folds, contradictions, and turns of irony. Someday, I would really like to read more about the philosophical basis of your thinking. I think that you possess a great and rare wisdom.
ReplyDeleteIn this article, you seem to suggest (not seem, but you actually spell it out in the final paragraph) that immigration is the root of the problem (the oscillation between the welfare and police states), and that the specific characteristics defining the Right and Left derive or are amplified from it too. How does this square with the deep history of immigration in the USA and the abiding idea that we are the safe harbor for oppressed immigrants from around the world? One example would be the Irish inflow of immigrants in the mid-19th century, the Civil War draft riots in NYC is a good example. Would American history have been better off without the immigration of that population too? What I am trying to highlight is the period of adjustment and acculturation of the American identity that all immigrant cultures require.
Perhaps a well functioning government could conduct this acculturation and integration better than we are doing and have done in the past. But America's government seems to be be incapable of functioning well, without waste and with foresight and good management. I have yet to read in the media a detailed analysis of our immigration and naturalization service, of how well or how badly they function, of how they can improve.
What has fallen out in the history of the USA is an abiding appreciation of concision in government. Today, laws are passed one after the other ad nauseam, in a blizzard of text. The idea that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" no longer applies today.
Immigration is part of it. But it's not just immigration as a phenomenon, but the way that immigration is shaped and selected by the left to undermine existing countries.
ReplyDeleteWith the draft riots for example, they were deliberately staged by the Democratic Party using German and then Irish immigrants for political purposes. And that's important to remember. They wanted to provoke the kind of response that took place. The left began doing that again with minority populations. It wanted race riots, etc to justify its welfare state and its path to power.
The left attempts to use groups as fifth columns for its own purposes, and in the process it tears those groups down. The Irish, the Jews, etc got out of the urban ghettos that the political machine wedged them into. Modern minorities haven't. And in part that is because the political machine has gotten better at keeping people there, giving them enough so that there's no reason to leave.
This article is spot on. The 'amnesty' fools have likely never visited a public health clinic, as they are not usually found in tony neighborhoods. Many of my patients were from a culture that was very different from traditional American culture, and they liked it that way.. They shrugged a bit when cases of tuberculosis were found in their apt. buildings, they shrugged again when 11 and 12 year old girls in those same buildings turned up pregnant. Medical staff could not question who sired those coming babies, and the parents usually played dumb, rather than bring more disgrace on the family.
ReplyDeleteNever in my wildest do-gooder dreams did I think I would be looking for counselors for support groups of teens with HIV..
Amnesty can't fix a society that doesn't think it needs fixing, so other than more Left voters, what is the point ? The cost of social services to this community would take the average taxpayer's breath away.
sophie
The ammunition orders by the government branches are staggering, and can only be for war in America. But they won't be able to do it alone, unless they resort to mass genocide using bigger things than small arms. Most people tend to forget that our government is the first and only government to ever use atomic bombs on humans. Did you ever wonder where are the fish kills came from where only one type of fish dies by the hundreds of thousands. That doesn't occur naturally. They have weapons that can wipe out certain races or groups based on certain racial factors. This government will not hesitate to kill their own people when they see they can't win. It's a sad state of affairs in such a brief amount of time.
ReplyDeleteand as the story goes...the root cause of the various problems we as a country and society have are...SPENDING by Government...take away the free handouts to the'needy' voters and many of the welfare states problems would disappear...Get the government out of all areas of 'business'...and get back to pre 1932 tax code....as in NO Income tax.....just a start....imho
ReplyDeleteNot so sure about this thesis. I never asked for Homeland Security to link to my town and provide military gear for police who worry about parades and DUI. The police, themselves, are uncomfortable as they are the ones who may get an order requiring either their submission to becoming the new SS or resignation. They have families. They are in a very tough position.
ReplyDeleteIf someone gives you a sturdy hammer, you will use it. Why arm the police with big hammers? Only in dissolving leftist cities do you find amoral aliens; the rest of us are fine, thank you. Also, the former US republic, is actively promoting civil unrest so as to solidify personal control after upheaval. Again, the police are in the middle of this crossing point. If some oblige a tyrant, I fear a domino affect will follow that will spiral beyond control, even that of the smug Marxist. You are right, in the end, we do not fear the police and tyranny is a bit at bay. One reason the level of fear is not palpable is that we have 300,000,000 hammers and many would-be carpenters have joined the union. This is why the leftists are in full attack on weapons. The weapons are the ultimate 10th Amendment.
Leftists’ first commandment is: you shall deny the existence of evil per se. In their pseudo gospel evil acts sure happen but only as a consequence of dire material conditions and if they are allowed to stage some clever transfer of wealth evil acts will vanish into thin air, men and 55 other genders will be freed from job lock, transgendered lions gone vegans will play not competitive soccer with zebras on marihuana fields, just for the joy of it, while moderate muslims will make jokes about the prophet and talk philosophy.
ReplyDeleteAnd I say again (and again and again and again,) to an ever-expanding non-listening audience:
ReplyDeleteIn the 1920s, International Communism was stalled by the desires of various peoples to maintain their national identities - hence Italian Fascism and National Socialism. Lenin's instinct was overwhelming brutality, but various equally-dedicated Communists proposed other strategies merely as a more-efficient alternative.
Prominent among these was the Italian Antonio Gramsci, author of the oft-quoted-and-virtually-always-misunderstood phrase "The Long March Through The Institutions." The institutions referred to, contra the popular assumption that he was referring to the Government and the school system and the universities, were in fact the institutions that Gramsci rightly identified as the pillars of any society.
The "Institutions" to be marched through, therefore, were the institutions of Marriage and Family, National Identity, Social Order, a stable currency, etcetcetc. Gramsci posited that a sufficient erosion of the pillars of a stable society would necessarily result in chaos - and that the populace would beg for totalitarianism as a means of restoring order.
And here we are now, no more and no less.
Congratulations, sheeple. You have become successful laboratory rodents in the Communist experiment.
"But if we 'discriminate' then it means that 'race"is real and that there are differences, irreconcilable differences, and then it's off to the ovens or something like that. You nazi!"
ReplyDeleteSultan, there was a story cautioning scientists from pursuing studies that demonstrate a link between inheritance and personality including intelligence and the difference between the races based on the logic that "scientific racism" was responsible for slavery and the WWII atrocities.
Americans are small-minded fanatics who will not tolerate dissent. Things may change, but not because Americans have become reasonable: things will change when their innate fanaticism will be channeled in a different direction, preferably, one of nationalism and patriotism based on some version of blood-and-soil.
Religion is the only means of shaping the American mind: initially it was low church Christianity which devolved into modern utopian universalism. Maybe, the next phase will be militant ethno-nationalism which, sadly, is the only way to restore sanity.
"...The cause was not, as the left and some libertarians believed, foreign policy, but immigration.The collision of populations and ideologies led to September 11 using the very planes that made international immigration so easy as weapons..."
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry, I don't believe that immigration caused 9/11, and I can't read it any other way. Other than that, I agree with everything. When early America needed immigrants, strong, skilled and honest people were most desirable. The unskilled had to have sponsors and cash enough to survive a week or so, as I was told by my immigrant father. They had to promise to become fluent in English and were expected to attend public language classes. The goal was to bring them into the American society, not isolate them in non-English speaking communities, where all things were subsidized and there was no need for independent self-respect.
The immigrant of choice today only supports welfare worker jobs, the more welfare the more welfare supervisors, so promotions are a function of welfare growth.
The Left, generally, cannot perceive of the monster they are creating, here and in the West. They are helping to poison their own families' lives, because destructive social policies will ultimately hurt.them most. This result is the logical end for those who unthinkingly follow their Socialist religion and Leaders. Only the leaders of the Left can gain temporary power within the police state that follows total society breakdown. In the end, they will be destroyed by the ultimate tyrant that takes control. Socialism/Communism/Fascism always lead to tyranny, and there's no such thing as a group tyrant. Some have to go...
Regards,
Correct diagnosis of the problem. Incorrect identification of root causes.
ReplyDeleteRight and Left is a false dichotomy--the Founding Fathers, after all, created our Constitutional Republic before the French Revolution, which was the origin of Right and Left wings within the Assembly.
ReplyDeleteThe real choice is between Tyranny, on the one hand, and Anarchy, on the other; the irony is that tyrants often use the threat of anarchy as an excuse for their abuse of power. The Founding Fathers put a system in place that was supposed to anchor the pendulum at just the right balance between a system of total control and a system of no control; unfortunately, the pendulum has been pulled far away from its center in the last 100 years.
I believe the number of folks who went deer hunting in Minnesota was 800,000. good luck with the American stasi.
ReplyDeleteright and left predated the French Revolution. The best proof of that is how the FR split American politics down the middle.
ReplyDeleteI can see the Republican - Democratic dichotomy but there is also the conservative versus leftist point of view and that is the way out. No one wants to admit it but after Giuliani police presence was less and not more and that is because he was able to move the balance away from the thugs. When crime was bad and the homeless out of control cops were regularly moving from subway train to subway train to max their visibility. Now you can be on a train at 3 a.m. and its crowded but there are no cops. The answer was simple. Attack those who attack the social contract from vandals on up to serious offenders. It is called a racist approach but it is the very opposite. The Giuliani broken windows policing could not have worked if minorities were in the majority lawless. You could not tip the balance if they were. It would overwhelm the effort. The liberal model of law enforcement is the primacy of the group. We will not see you as individuals but as a class and the best and worst make up the class. It doesn't make sense until you see that once crime goes down people are more likely to demand even better government. Class based enforcement is about maintaining status quo at all costs.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous said...
ReplyDelete"Make no mistake, the NSA programs on domestic "data gathering" are a mother's milk of any totalitarian state. You do not need Stasi 2.0 to have a totalitarian state, but you can not even pretend that when you have Stasi 2.0 you do not have a totalitarian state. What we do not have yet are the armed goons at our doors, but we are well past incipient stage of totalitarian government, so goons are coming"
You are so right about Stasi 2.0. We don't have the armed goons just yet but we do have the Stasi Zersetzung (decomposition of the mind) in place, it is being used as a touch-less form of government control on political dissidents of all kinds: Right or Left, Tea Party or Anarchist, deeply religious or Agnostic.
Journalists and whistle blowers top the list. The issue doesn't particularly matter. If it can influence others it's deemed dangerous.
Stasi 2.0 relies for the moment on the methods used by the East German Stasi to keep people in line. Sensitization to a benign object, so that the person who has been sensitized to the object can be brought under control without show of force. The object is associated with harassment and that is then used to leverage control.
Oppressive regimes have resorted to these psychological control methods for a simple reason: they work if the person doesn't know what's being done.
Gas lighting/ghosting: misplacing things in a person's home, moving things around and then returning them, making the person think he is losing his mind. Others will begin to doubt the person's sanity and naturally his credibility on an issue.
Few armed goons but trust me, Stasi 2.0 is indeed very real, and the tactics its modern version employees are tried and true. As for the use of psychological methods to destroy an influential person's credibility it is also important to recognize that not all of the measures are psychological, but very apparent to the victim and the perpetrator.
"So how do you tell the difference between genuine victims of Zersetztung and nuts? Well, for a start nuts don’t have witnesses; but genuine victims often do.
The Litmus Test that I apply is this: Genuine victims will usually have some corroborative evidence - eye witness testimony, recordings of threats, property damage, etc. - to back up some of the incidents. They will have tried to get the matter investigated and will also have evidence of a cover up."
Take my word for it, this is happening in the US right now. Boots on the ground.
The NSA collection of mega data is the militarization of the Internet.
Keliata
Gene said...
ReplyDeleteNot so sure about this thesis. I never asked for Homeland Security to link to my town and provide military gear for police who worry about parades and DUI. The police, themselves, are uncomfortable as they are the ones who may get an order requiring either their submission to becoming the new SS or resignation. They have families. They are in a very tough position."
I agree, and they are in a very tough position. Not many have the luxury of losing their jobs in an effort to buck the system. I was joking online with someone about the inland DHS checkpoints in the US. DHS or Border Control whatever simply wants a verbal declaration of citizenship/
There are a lot of people refusing to identify themselves as American and repeatedly ask the agents if they're being detained etc. Nothing says "I'm an American" than repeating "I know my rights."
Ditto for photographers giving police their ID without probable cause.
It's going to take a bit for Americans to surrender their rights. The number of LEO willing to take our rights away is growing even though it clearly makes them uncomfortable.
Keliata
We may not have a police state, quite yet, in the full definition, but we have genocide, or if the word is offensive, then call it for what it is, mass murder.
ReplyDeleteThere are 440,000 people dying in our country from preventable medical errors. These do not include the figures which are hidden or the gray figures that never made it as part of the statistics. Depending on what article you read, the figures could be anywhere between 750,000 and 1,000,000. This is genocide. Why? Our government is so corrupt they refuse to acknowledge this is happening and are ignoring it. The difference between genocide in the United States and elsewhere is, nobody is singled out. Babies, children, young, old, black, white, all are dying across the board.
Our country passed laws preventing Americans from getting justice and accountability. Americans can not even have the right of due process under our 7th Amendment Constitutional Right. Yet, we preach to the world about "rights" under the guise of respectability. The fact is, we are corrupt and have lost our humanity years ago. We sold our soul to the company store.
http://youtu.be/aEOlpahRtnQ
Sending you a link to show you the best medical care given in our country could possibly be the veterinarian clinics. Maybe the most merciful way to end a patient's suffering would be pulling the trigger. You judge.
If you find yourself in Texas, make sure your life insurance policy is paid in full.
If you are in NYC, avoid the doctor mentioned. The Texas Medical Board failed to police after their own.
Thank you for your time,
Cilla Mitchell
A Texas nurse and US Army vet.
"In the United States, it's not the populations that drift in and out of jail who find the police terrifying, but those who don't."
ReplyDeleteThis couldn't be more true. Children born into welfare dependence and raised by the streets look to police as the latest social worker showing up to solve their problems or pay attention to them (they feel the same way about social workers themselves). They get angry if nobody comes to take care of them. The activists may rant and rage about "police states" but the people the police are coming to arrest just echo these words to gain attention and attract more people to take care of them.
90% of what happens in municipal court is young (rapidly aging) men acting out parental abandonment -- and the solution isn't more free stuff from society, because (a) that doesn't help people grow up, and (b) there's never enough free stuff to fill that void.
The other 10% is sociopaths enjoying the consequent chaos.
When young men were being killed in Atlanta -- the missing and murdered kids -- the ugly truth was that crimes like this were already being committed so frequently that the police had a hard time sorting out the victims of one predator from another. And once money for victims was involved, there were parents who came forward to demand money for kids whom they had abused and driven away or perhaps even killed -- but definitely had neglected.
When the line between serial killing and normative parenting becomes that porous, you can't talk about a "society in crisis" anymore. It is just no society at all -- no parenting, no sanity, and nobody but armed police forces can go in to maintain order.
Because of this reality -- because of reality -- I find the current libertarian-inspired anti-police sentiment in citizens' movements naive and disturbing. It is also largely the product of a few loud voices -- all libertarian, frequently pumped up by the inane Reason Magazine crowd, Alex Jones, and certain national columnists like Conrad Black.
The libertarians don't represent anywhere near the majority of these movements but they claim they are in charge and claim they are more sophisticated and wise than the grassroots and that the grassroots should follow them -- or shut up, which is the sort of treatment people put up with far too much from the libertarian nationals and from loud libertarians in local groups. The pressure brought by loud voices (and monied nationals) demanding that activists carefully censor themselves lest they talk about what is broadly defined as "social issues" is deeply damaging to the Tea Party movement.
What to do? Socially conservative, pro-Tea Party speakers need to get on the road and reach out to the people being silenced in these groups. They need to know that they should not let anyone silence them on social issues -- and especially not their friends.
Daniel, good job once more taking a look at things from a different angle. I've often though of the hubris of those who think that the solutions to problems is more laws, more police, more authority. The key thing is to be able to distinguish problems and symptoms. If you can't and deal only with symptoms and never address the underlying problem, another symptom is going to pop up somewhere else.
ReplyDeleteA little example of what I mean. Almost all people would think that political corruption is a problem that should be dealt with. It's not though, it's a symptom of an overly powerful government that can give or take away on a whim. Does anyone honestly think that a business would rather pay a lobbyist rather than spend that money on junkets and three martini lunches? The reason they pay lobbyists is to use the power of government to do something to their advantage or merely as a matter of survival. Take away the government's power to pick winners and losers and lobbying would disappear.
Utter bollocks.
ReplyDeleteThe police state is there to protect the elites during the upcoming riots.
The crime in in the inner cities, never felt by the vast middle class is an excuse for building the police state, not the reason for it.
It is merely manufacturing consent.
Charlotte Twight has the best two word description for the system we live under: "Participatory Fascism."
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