This did happen in Vancouver, yes. I remember hearing about this as a matter of fact. Canada is not a rose garden these days either but overall has less crime and less violence than the US. But due to globalization it has it's issues, too, I won't deny that. RobOriginally Posted by bae
Rob - Vancouver, a couple years ago when I stepped out of a concert:
You might want to try Mexico, I hear the police there are very friendly and honest.
Maybe the increasingly widespread out of control behavior of uniformed officers--they were/are so bad in Seattle they were cited by the DOJ a couple of years back--demonstrates a testing of the waters. If their brutality toward the weakest among us goes generally unremarked, they may step it up. And--if we're not there already--we'll all be living in a police state.
I don't think there are enough police for that. Or budget to hire them.
You may have a point. We can only hope.
Hope is not a plan :-)
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
That's why people younger than I are out in the streets, bae. I took my turn. Bread and circuses may occupy the rest.
I hope you're right about scale and budgets--but that problem could be overcome by imposing martial law.
Good God, I'm careening into paranoia...
Doubtful.
Read Rehnquist's book on the topic:
Martial law on any scale in this country would be a non-starter, if you do a little math. Look at how much effort we have spent in "subduing" Afghanistan, a country about the size of Montana+Wyoming, using a military that has a bigger budget than almost the entire rest of the planet combined....
Now imagine trying to do that in the US, which has 10x the population, a lot more area, and, oh, say a 100 million armed citizens on a slow day, and about 10 million who take to the field during deer season. A country in which almost every first responder since 9/11 has been trained as a HAZMAT operator, and knows how to wipe out entire city blocks with relatively little effort.
There's not a military on the planet that could impose martial law on this country against the will of the citizens.
Well if someone wants to propose a definition of a police state, then one could say yes this is true, and no that isn't, and yes this definition corresponds to common usage whatever that is etc..
Otherwise:
"Because there are different political perspectives as to what an appropriate balance is between individual freedom and national security, there are no definitive objective standards to determine whether the term "police state" applies to a particular nation at any given point in time. Thus, it is difficult to evaluate objectively the truth of allegations that a nation is, or is not becoming, a police state"
[wikipedia]
Because I really think it's a continuum. And a lot of police intimidation can be acheieved without a cop on every corner (leveraged intimidation so to speak). It only needs to be enough to produce a certain amount of fear. And that's your degrees of police state. By the way these protestors are protesting despite having guns on armored vehicles pointing at them. A continuum by definition means there are worse and lesser degrees.
Trees don't grow on money
The protesters in Ferguson just bumped up several notches in my respect-o-meter. Continuing to protest while government goons have their guns pointed on them from armored vehicles shows a great deal of courage to me. And conviction. And complete and utter disgust with the situation. One would think if the protestors are willing to continue even though their country thinks their lives are worth so little as to have guns trained on them while peacefully protesting - one would think those in power would get a clue. This is not going to just go away, and there are other communities this anger and resentment live in in the US that could easily go up like a tinder box too.....I am afraid that cooler heads are not going to prevail on this one, but time will tell. So far from what I've seen the police in that town need to be fired and denied their pensions - I know this will never happen but just imagine how such an action would strike terror into the heart of every US policeman/woman. Especially the being denied their pensions part. I don't know how this is all going to end but I'm hoping for better than we have seen so far. I'm also glad Obama emerged from vacation by the Massachusetts seashore and made a nice four minute speech. I agree with much of what he said but I, like many others, want to see some results, not just soothing words. Rob
DH was telling me that quite a bit of war time equipment has been sold to police departments - tanks, weapons, special ops equipment, etc - in the past few years. It's too bad that their original mission of protecting the populace seems to be morphing into something else.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote