Remember Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP? After the place was cleared, a bunch of local businesses and property owners sued the city and recently all reached a settlement. One part that definitely didn't help Seattle were tens of thousands of deleted text messages:
I was initially excited at repercussions meeting Seattle for some of their reckless behavior, but left with a sigh at the reminders of the legal and procedural hurdles to holding the government accountable.
Noriega was a Panamanian dictator. Or at least he was when I was stationed there and I ended up walking through a pro-Noriega rally to get to my girlfriend's house. :)
I remember listening to a Radiolab story (https://radiolab.org/episodes/no-special-duty) on Castle Rock vs Gonzales (they also talk to Joe Lozito) and being shocked and horrified. As I recall, the legal consensus, at least from the people they talked to, was that once you legally bind the police to protect people you automatically slide quickly into a police state because you remove their "discretion" and therefore they're required to enforce every law all the time without exception. I've never been sure how good that argument is (it sounds a little bonkers, but not totally unfamiliar given what little I know), so I'd be very interested to hear more discussion about it. Is there truly no middle ground, and this is just one of those instances when you have to come to some kind of terms with the safety vs freedom conflict? Or is there some kind of careful reform that could maybe make a difference here?
Officials in the US and elsewhere are soft fools, and in current and coming circumstances those who know no history (and nothing about human nature) are in for rude shocks as we shift into the hard times, hard men phase of reality. Where institutions fail, people get creative. It sounds like a joke or metaphor to say these crooks should be tarred and feathered (and run out of town on a rail), but that's a real thing people did in America not that long ago. It's a brutal public torture to punish officious fools hellbent on destroying the lives and livelihoods of normal folks who just want to be left alone to run their own lives. Not only effigies have been hung from lampposts. We are a hairsbreadth away from something that will not be pretty. Watch France.
We might not have boiling pitch lying around on an everyday basis in 2023, but that is where the indomitable spirit and creativity of our kind comes to the fore. Nigeria and South Africa, as the public order became so corrupt and retarded that ordinary citizens could comply no longer, the practice arose to deal with thieves, rapists, and others by 'necklacing'. There's always the old country practice of 'shoot, shovel, and shut up'.
I'm not calling for this state of affairs, mind you. It will be horrible. It also looks inevitable, barring a whole lot of epiphanies and stellar leadership that I don't see anywhere on the horizon.
Was this doom posting really necessary? :(
I was initially excited at repercussions meeting Seattle for some of their reckless behavior, but left with a sigh at the reminders of the legal and procedural hurdles to holding the government accountable.
sigh, bring back the guillotine?
Noriega was a Panamanian dictator. Or at least he was when I was stationed there and I ended up walking through a pro-Noriega rally to get to my girlfriend's house. :)
I remember listening to a Radiolab story (https://radiolab.org/episodes/no-special-duty) on Castle Rock vs Gonzales (they also talk to Joe Lozito) and being shocked and horrified. As I recall, the legal consensus, at least from the people they talked to, was that once you legally bind the police to protect people you automatically slide quickly into a police state because you remove their "discretion" and therefore they're required to enforce every law all the time without exception. I've never been sure how good that argument is (it sounds a little bonkers, but not totally unfamiliar given what little I know), so I'd be very interested to hear more discussion about it. Is there truly no middle ground, and this is just one of those instances when you have to come to some kind of terms with the safety vs freedom conflict? Or is there some kind of careful reform that could maybe make a difference here?
Officials in the US and elsewhere are soft fools, and in current and coming circumstances those who know no history (and nothing about human nature) are in for rude shocks as we shift into the hard times, hard men phase of reality. Where institutions fail, people get creative. It sounds like a joke or metaphor to say these crooks should be tarred and feathered (and run out of town on a rail), but that's a real thing people did in America not that long ago. It's a brutal public torture to punish officious fools hellbent on destroying the lives and livelihoods of normal folks who just want to be left alone to run their own lives. Not only effigies have been hung from lampposts. We are a hairsbreadth away from something that will not be pretty. Watch France.
We might not have boiling pitch lying around on an everyday basis in 2023, but that is where the indomitable spirit and creativity of our kind comes to the fore. Nigeria and South Africa, as the public order became so corrupt and retarded that ordinary citizens could comply no longer, the practice arose to deal with thieves, rapists, and others by 'necklacing'. There's always the old country practice of 'shoot, shovel, and shut up'.
I'm not calling for this state of affairs, mind you. It will be horrible. It also looks inevitable, barring a whole lot of epiphanies and stellar leadership that I don't see anywhere on the horizon.