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Radley Balko reports that a group of his friends — young libertarians from the Washington DC area — met at the Jefferson Memorial last night to silently (wearing iPods) dance for a few minutes at midnight in celebration of Jefferson’s birthday. The Park Police showed up and ordered the dancers to disperse. When one young woman asked them why, they shoved her up against a pillar, handcuffed her, and arrested her. (Update: Here’s video.)
We probably couldn’t ask for a purer example of the principle that the primary mission of authority is to preserve authority. Even today, knowing that almost anyone could be holding a video camera and their actions could wind up on YouTube, cops will still bully and assault people for refusing to instantly defer to arbitrary authority. (That first video is a classic of the genre. The cop is a tubby man in a ridiculous uniform, riding around in a tiny vehicle that may as well be a clown car. His life as a cop isn’t turning out like it does in the movie and on TV, and he’s taking it out on anyone he can push around.)
Megan McArdle, another DC libertarian, picks up the story, and her comments section quickly fills with forelock-tuggers and knee-benders justifying the actions of the Park Police, even if they have to make up facts to do it. It’s practically a catalog of dishonest argumentation and propaganda. In fact, I think it’s useful to dissect the examples so that we can recognize them when we see similar arguments on the nation’s editorial pages. (This has turned out longer than I expected it to, but it’s not like we have to pay extra to print more pages.)
For example, a commenter named Jeff asks “If the Memorial is closed and people refuse to leave, why NOT arrest them for disorderly conduct?” — not aware that the memorial is open 24/7, too lazy to spend ten seconds on a Google search to check his facts, too lazy even to read the earlier comments where this had already been pointed out. When his mistake is rubbed in his face, Jeff adopts a faux-polite writing style and moves his goalposts. He argues first that the memorial is closed to certain kinds of events, of which group dancing might be one. (It might not, but hey, he doesn’t know, it might.) He later argues that since DC is a high-crime city, the Park Police have a legitimate concern, and even though it isn’t immediately clear, we need to grant them the benefit of the doubt. Of course, that’s totally ignoring the actual facts of the case — that the police didn’t arrest all the dancers, but merely the one who questioned their orders, and that the police offered no explanation for their actions. In Jeff’s mind, it’s only the authorities who get the benefit of the doubt. Ordinary citizens just have to obey orders.
Then we’ve got MarkG, who blames the dancers for appearing “odd”, and claims that “the police have to make a snap judgment about what to do”. Why exactly the police should need to make snap judgments in cases where no violence is occurring and no weapons or threat to life or limb are evident, that’s beyond me. Apparently, the fact that authorities sometimes unfortunately need to make snap judgments to preserve the lives of themselves or others means, in MarkG’s mind, that all judgments made by cops should be granted this same life-or-death importance.
MarkG later suggests that by dancing near where they lived, rather than spending several hours driving cars they might not have so they could dance in some other location, they were relying upon society to “provide them with a safe venue”. (Because we all know how safe DC is.) Somehow, he think that this means they shouldn’t complain when society fails to do so. Or something. He never actually completes the thought; his purpose here is to make a half-assed accusation of hypocrisy. See, by being in the city, they were relying on civilized standards of behavior, But by dancing, they were violating civilized standards of behavior. Because, y’know, dancing is weird! And as civilized people, we are obliged to crush out any impulses towards novelty, joy, or spontaneity.
There’s also LWM, the hardened cynic. He knows the score! He’s gonna tell the whiney little libertarians all about how the big, hard world works:
Probably the sense of entitlemnt and arrogance common among this group of right wing libertarians pissed the cops off. They just didn’t like you. Can’t say I blame them much. They found you in contempt of cop. No reprieve.
He understands how authoritarians think, but he’s lost any hope for change. In his world, the bad guys have already won every battle, so there’s no point in fighting. Since he’s not in authority, he suffers from a sense of inferiority. He compensates by puffing himself up in arguments like this, playing the part of the smart guy who passes on the wisdom that you just can’t fight the system. His argument is designed to appeal to people who recognize the nature of authority, but don’t feel strong enough to buck it. It’s also a comforting argument for those who aren’t inclined to demonstrate or act weird, much the same way that assertions about things a crime victim might have done to invite the crime are comforting to those who fear they might one day be victims. These arguments tell you that as long as you obey the rules, you’ll be fine. (LWM also doesn’t know what “right wing” means, but that’s a post for another day.)
I’ve saved my favorite for last. Darkjethro:
Only in this country can one march in the streets of the capital obnoxiously protesting “the oppression inherent in the system” without fear of retribution.
He goes on to regurgitate the same points the other authoritarians had been making — dancing is so weird the cops have to investigate, the woman was asking for trouble when she questioned the dispersal order. He even goes on to blame the dancers for diverting the cops from the important task of protecting the rest of the park. But I want to admire that paragraph. One sentence of not even thirty words, and it packs at least three propagandistic payloads. Let’s unpack them:
1: “Only in this country” — In Darkjethro’s head, the United States is the only nation in the world that tolerates peaceful protest in the streets of its capital. England, Canada, France, Japan — all totalitarian nations, apparently. I bet he thinks the US is the only nation that accepts immigrants, too. The actual purpose of this phrase is to appeal to the little jingoistic spark of American exceptionalism that most Americans have programmed into them in grade school. It’s to get you nodding along, with a flag waving and “The Star-Spangled Banner” playing along in your head, to distract you for the rest of the payloads.
2: “‘[T]he oppression inherent in the system’” — You probably recognize this as a (distorted) quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In its original context, it’s spoken by a medieval peasant who’s just been spouting a lot of 20th century leftist jargon. He’s being assaulted by King Arthur, who’s annoyed at having his time wasted and authority questioned when he wants answers to simple questions. On the one hand, the scene is an example of an authority figure abusing a subject, there’s validity to the peasant’s complaint, but the peasant is also ascribing to “the system” an act of violence that’s primarily the result of his desire to argue about politics in a context where such argument will do little good. By using this quote, Darkjethro is attempting to paint political demonstrators in general as whiney complainers who have no understanding of the context within which their protests are embedded. Darkjethro’s misquote (substituting “oppression” for “violence”) might be accidental, but it furthers his propagandistic purposes. By casting his imagined demonstrations as protests over “oppression” rather than “violence”, he makes the demonstrators seem less sympathetic. It’s easy to sympathize with a victim of violence, but we all know people who shout “oppression” any time they don’t get their way.
3: “[W]ithout fear of retribution” — Here’s the ultimate payload. He’s asserting that the US is a country (the only country) where you can demonstrate in the capital without fear of retribution, even though the very article he’s responding to is about demonstrators facing arbitrary retribution in the nation’s capital! He’s trying to use your patriotic pride, your belief in your nation’s ideals, to get you to ignore the very betrayal of those ideals.
This tactic should be familiar to anyone who’s been watching the Bush administration deny that it tortures prisoners. Bush asserts as a normative statement that “Torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.” And yet, we do torture prisoners, and hand people over to other countries that torture them.
All of these tactics — the use of your ideals to overturn your trust in facts, the assertion of nebulous threats that justify arbitrary authority, the portrayal of protesters as lunatics, the claim that an all-encompassing bureaucracy has legitimate authority over our every breath and step, that you’ll be fine as long as you don’t “make trouble” — these tactics can be seen and heard every day wherever political discussion takes place. They’re the words with which once-free people talk themselves into tyranny.
There's also a bit of populist schadenfreude on display: Oh look, a bunch of rich white "libertarians" got knocked around by the cops. *snicker* Don't bend over for the soap, assholes! Sickening, but it looks like some of them are on "the left," like it or not.
I will admit to feeling a smidge of schadenfreude myself, watching Megan get hit with the kind of argument she so often dishes out.
This does not, however, take precedence over the facts: It was a cool and entirely appropriate idea, and the interference is just one more sign of my country's moral degeneracy in the halls of power. Bleah.
How sad. I grew up in Alexandria. We used to end late nights out when we didn't want to go home yet by going to the monuments and just hanging out. Midnight was a popular time, because the lights switched from evening mode (the spectacular gorgeousness you see in touristy pictures) to overnight mode (still pretty, but more subdued). In the summer this happened at about midnight. When thrown, the switches underneath the monument sounded a giant boom, boom, boom. We had great fun watching the tourists jump, gasp, clutch each other, and so on. The Lincoln Memorial was the best. Good clean fun. Very steampunk. Don't remember too much hassling from the cops. This has all gotten way to far out of hand.
Is it even possible any more to imagine a situation that sounds like a bad George Orwell parody, without finding out that it's actually happened somewhere in the US in the past couple of years?
Briefly: they're brutally understaffed, the folks who patrol national monuments for the Parks Service. Brutally understaffed to the point where they're not capable of protecting the monuments they're responsible for from terrorism, because the Bush administration has decided that it's not a place that they want to spend money.
Their boss made a stink. The Bush administration had her fired for it.
Their budget has not been increased since.
I would have thought the libertarians would be thrilled to have this concrete evidence that the government is responsibly not spending tax dollars at the insignificant cost of their civil liberties.
I have plenty of issues with "libertarians" who consider their crusade to abolish OSHA a crucial struggle for human freedom, but I would hardly claim that they're all rich, or even all white. For one thing, that's obviously, demonstrably, factually untrue, and anyone who claims otherwise has just forfeited their membership in the reality-based community. It's equally obvious that libertarians have as much of a right to do silly, arty things in public as anyone else does.
Really, my only argument with most libertarians is a practical one: I don't think some of the policies they call for would actually increase human freedom. They have similar issues with me. And if I woke up tomorrow to find that the primary debate in American politics was between liberals and libertarians, I'd immediately suspect that I'd died and gone to heaven. Meanwhile, if dimbulb Park Service cops decide to beat up on libertarians, then I'm a libertarian.
"It's equally obvious that libertarians have as much of a right to do silly, arty things in public as anyone else does." And this really is the point of it.
Now, I used to hang out with guys who did sound work for punk rock bands, and I know that one person's dancing can be another person's threatened assault. But if the cops had any such feeling about this crowd, their obligation is to present some evidence for it. "Because I say so" should never be sufficient, when it comes to the police power.
I also have to give some clear applause to Megan's post for her awareness that however this turns out, it's likely to go much, much better than it would for someone of another race and many fewer connections to levers of counter-power. I criticize her a bunch, and it makes me happy to have something to point at and go "but this truly gets it".
Matt, not many of those comments come from the left; and when you get a whole comment thread full of "the victim had it coming" types, acting like a pub full of drunk rhinoceri and cheering on each other's nearly identical comments, the left tends to be conspicuously absent.
...
Speaking generally now:
It really is a bonding ritual. They celebrate their shared self-abasement, and pretend that blaming the victim and talking tough means they're hard men. It doesn't. For one thing, real tough guys don't have to make a constant parade of the fact. For another, if you let them go on talking that way for thread after thread, and keep count of all the things they insist are threatening (i.e., that frighten them), it's often a surprisingly long list. And, as Avram observes, they don't do rudimentary Google factchecking. Finding out more about the story and the victim can ony ruin the fun.
This behavior is getting more and more common. A good deal of the struggle to build civilized community at Boing Boing has consisted of dealing with these guys. It's immortalized in Boing Boing's moderation guidelines as item #2 in the list of posting behaviors likely to bring you into disfavor (#1 being spamming, linkwhoring, and astroturfing):
"2. Making supercilious and unpleasant remarks in a civil liberties thread about how the victim had it coming. This is not to say that victims never have it coming; but there's a species of internet demi-troll that appears to specialize in posting such comments. Try not to look like you're one of them."Is this warranted? You betcha. When these guys get to egging each on (they don't have a tenth the bravado when they're alone), they get so nasty that decent, thoughtful commenters are driven off.
They're definitely in violation of Rule #10 of Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space:
"You can let one jeering, unpleasant jerk hang around for a while, but the minute you get two or more of them egging each other on, they both have to go, and all their recent messages with them. There are others like them prowling the net, looking for just that kind of situation. More of them will turn up, and they’ll encourage each other to behave more and more outrageously. Kill them quickly and have no regrets."And, in fact, I have none. Remember Megan Meier, that poor hapless kid who committed suicide after her next-door neighbors concocted an elaborate online hoax boyfriend who befriended and then dumped her? I've seen guys of this stripe mock and jeer at that, and come up with reasons why Megan Meier had it coming.
If you want to observe the species in the wild, try just about any comment thread at Consumerist that follows an entry about someone who's been mistreated and/or is in a vulnerable position.
But, you know, the libertarians, at least the McArdle branch, had no problem with the decisionmaking that brought us to this point. A cop who's told that he or she can't fail and who's not given the staffing to be able to afford discretion is going to err on the side of lack of nuance.
This is a known issue. It has been for years.
If the small government set had an issue with it, the time to express it was when it was made abundantly clear that we were going with low-bid security.
Honestly, this strikes me as the same argument on their part as Ann Coulter's bravely striking out against airport security inconveniencing white people. Well, yeah, it does. I'd be much more sympathetic if she were appalled that people she doesn't like were getting hit.
It is interesting that "only in America" has different meanings within and without the US.
Within, it means "here is an example of America's great freedom"; without, it means "here is an example of America's near-incomprehensible wackiness, often relating to law suits, crime, or guns".
In both cases, the story that immediately follows the phrase is one that confirms the speaker's beliefs about the US.
I hate to tell you this, but it's not a Bush thing. In college during the late '90s I knew some people in a swing-dancing group who went up to DC to dance at the monuments, and they were regularly chased off by cops.
Leaving national monuments under-protected enhances their security theater value. Sacrifice a National Monument card, gain a Declare War Against Iran card in its place.
They could have had it coming.
IF. They were singing and dancing the Cell Block Tango (Chicago):
Pop. Six, Squish. UhUh, Cicero, Lipschitz.
He had it coming
He had it coming
He only had himself to blame
If you'd have been there
If you'd have seen it
I betcha you would have done the same!
But then again, it doesn't say what they were dancing to, nor what style, so I'm going to count this as unlikely.
julia @#9:
It seems to me that well-funded, fully-staffed police also abuse their power.
Sean O'Hara:
Some of that was happening, yes. But when it happened, you didn't get flocks of human howler monkeys on the internet announcing that it was the victims' fault.
TNH @8:
This behavior is getting more and more common.
Do you think that reflects something about the Internet, something about the general political culture, or ... something else?
It's my impression that this particular form of Bad Netizenship is more gender-neutral than some of the others -- "gender-neutral" in the sense that it's a form of BN that females fall into as readily as males. Females are perhaps less likely to think people should be punished for pure anti-authoritarianism, but talk about someone transgressing gender norms and they come right out of the woodwork.
Or do I see a lot of females (women and girls) do this because I go to a lot of female-dominated netspace? Is it really a guy thing after all?
Just watched the first video. Felt fourteen again. Not in a good way.
And dittoing the sympathy for right-libertarians. They've been taught repeatedly that communism and socialism have failed--don't eat the French cheese, kids. So they hope there's truth in Milton Friedman's myths.
Teresa @#15: unless you happened to subscribe to rec.victim.blame.moderated...
Sean O'Hara, in #11, it's been my general observation that people who say "I hate to tell you this" are almost always lying about that. You may want to find a different way to start contrarian sentences.
Anyway, you don't have to tell me that oppressive policing didn't start with Bush. I remember Waco under Clinton, and Ruby Ridge under the previous Bush. And the kitten-stomping BATF. And Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo. And the MOVE firebombing in Philadelphia, and Kent State, and goddamn Shay's Rebellion, OK?
My points, which you can read right up there in black and #dddddd, are that (1) that comment thread on McMegan's blog provides a particular rich collection of classic authoritarian propaganda tropes, and (2) you can see one of these tropes being used by our current administration and its supporters to deny that it's torturing people.
Actually, it belatedly occurs to me that Sean may have been responding, not to my post, but to Julia's comment about the Parks Service being understaffed, or some other comment. If that's the case, I apologize for being snippy.
Heck, even if that's not the case, I apologize for being snippy. Just less sincerely.
Great post, and great analysis of the commentator tactics. Thanks.
Avram, I'm not applauding civil liberties violations.
I'm saying that this is a road that our small-government friends have sent us down. We're living, all of us, with low-bid functionaries charged with making sure we don't do whatever they imagine stepping out of line is, and we've heard little but applause and dismissiveness from people who have an ideological prejudice against spending more than the least they can when they're most likely not going to be the ones to deal with the consequences.
If there was a libertarian outcry against Homeland Security employees being cut off from job protections and not being given living wages and benefits, I missed it. Teresa Chambers didn't have a lot of defenders.
It's genuinely terrible that we're reaping the whirlwind here. That's not the country we're supposed to be living in.
I'm least hurting for the people who weren't troubled when the seeds were sown.
Apparently, the fact that authorities sometimes unfortunately need to make snap judgments to preserve the lives of themselves or others means, in MarkG’s mind, that all judgments made by cops should be granted this same life-or-death importance.
This is a poor justification but a good line of explanation. Throughout cop training in the United States, there are several central and constant themes: expect the worst, and do the things that will keep you alive. These are used to justify everything, to a ridiculous degree - keep your shoes polished because scruffy-looking cops are more likely to be attacked. Similarly: be assertive, take control of the situation immediately, because if you let the other guy get the upper hand in a contact, he'll be more inclined to attack you. 'How to deal with someone who, as it turns out, is doing nothing wrong' is, unfortunately, not a high priority.
In a deeply demoralised, understaffed agency with no money for non-essential training, lacking the luxury of choosing only the best employees, in a scary high-crime city, things will tend to get pared back to the dumb basics. Obviously the individual cops here screwed up badly, and I'm not trying to exonerate them; but if all you give someone is a can-opener, then drum into them the idea that the can-opener is the most important thing in the world, you should not be surprised if they treat every problem as a can of beans. Pttng t dwn t jckbtd thggry prly fr th sk f g-grtfctn s knjrk crctr.
Not that willful neglect isn't an effective method of control in its own right.
Avram@19: I'm reminded of Spike: "I hate to brag, but -- Oh, who am I kidding? I love to brag!"
Julia (@22 and earlier)
I'm trying, but failing, to understand your argument here. It seems to me that you claim that under-resourced police forces are more likely to arrest people 'just in case' as opposed to letting them keep on doing their stuff for a bit. And that therefore we should spend even more money on the police.
If that is your argument that pardon me for being ever so slightly sceptical. The way it looks to me from the other side of the pond is that the park police have far too many officers who don't have anything better to do than arrest people for "looking at me in a funny way", "loitering with intent to use a pedestrian crossing" or similar non-crimes.
(giving in to temptation) "... But ... But ... the -children-! We have to protect the -children-!"
More sensibly - this seems to be another aspect of the race to the bottom[0] that took off with a vengeance somewhere around the industrial revolution, and hasn't looked back since.
Why take the time to go for quality, when you can elect to go for quantity -- and having elected to go for quantity, surely you can reduce that other pesky variable, cost... since you can just buy interchangeable cogs[1] cheaply on the open market... and after all, things keep on working for a surprising length of time without any (expensive! Why bother!) maintenance or upkeep.
... and then, surprise, surprise... one day things stop working, and the problem isn't easily repairable[2].
[0] Quality, capability, cost...
[1] Shirts, shoes, people...
[2] No parts, no people, no prayer of a fix...
Patrick, #6: I don't think I've ever met a rich Libertarian. Most of the ones I know range from "struggling" to "dirt-poor". I have an untested hypothesis that Libertarianism in poor people is a form of magical thinking -- if they could just get rid of all that "government interference," then they'd somehow be well-off. (There's some support for this in arguments that I've heard some of them make, but it's far from rigorous.)
Earl, #12: I'd be much happier if that didn't sound like such a likely frame for the way this Administration thinks.
Lee (@28)
I'm a reasonably well off libertarian. Not as rich as creosote perhaps but a long way from "struggling"/ "dirt-poor". Going on the amount of money Ron Paul has managed to raise it seems to me that there are plenty of libertarians in a similar position to me in the USA.
if all you give someone is a can-opener
The phrase I like to use is "In this outfit, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a screw."
But that doesn't explain why the cops acted the way they did. The people they dispersed and arrested were the innocents they were supposed to protect.
They’re the words with which once-free people talk themselves into tyranny.
And keep themselves there. This is not the first time these sorts of parroted arguments have been heard. Every totalitarian government or strong man dictator in history has used these same arguments, and insisted that loyal citizens repeat them on command to prove their loyalty (and thus their unsuitability as targets of abuse from police or other citizens).
We've heard it in more languages than I can count. They all had a word for the kind of activity that was to be feared and the kind of people who did it. In England in the early 20th it was bolshy Jews, in Russia betweeb 1917 and 1991 it was некультурный or хулиганство борьбе с революционерами, in China the names have changed several times in the last century but somehow the foreign devils have always been behind it. These days in Zimbabwe there's a whole range of nasty epithets like "tea-boy" and "witch" for people who dare to oppose Robert Mugabe.
So should we be surprised we finally see the same behavior in the US? No, we should be angry, and sad for our country for going down this well-traveled road, but not surprised. There's very little that happens "only in America."
I have to admit I'm rather ambivalent about this whole situation.
I remember long long ago in a kinder and gentler era the one time I had a cop pull a gun on me, from behind no less. It was the mid 80s and I was one of a group playing lasertag after hours in the parking garage of the San Jose Federal Building. Don't laugh, it's not as insane as it sounds. One of the group who'd invited me assured me it was safe and they always called to alert the police beforehand so they would know that the Friday Night Firefight was taking place in the building.
This night was different. Someone had forgotten to call it in. But what was the real problem was that we surprised a group of Japanese students who had heard terrifying reports of American gang warfare and so, upon seeing a lasertag group, reported the gang fight as they saw it to the university police, who ended up jumping their jurisdiction to go into the Federal Building garage.
Eventually the guns were put away, and after a long lecture from a cop about how a buddy of his was a wreck after accidentally shooting a kid in a similar situation, the business came out about the university cops jumping their jurisdiction and the regular city cops knowing about the lasertag players as a regular thing, even though someone had forgotten to call it in that night.
Oops.
In the end, everybody went home, the cops more aware of what was going on and the lasertag players more aware of the scary and paranoid world that cops live in. Japanese exchange students too apparently.
As for dancing around at monuments at midnight, I think a lot of this goes under the heading of freaking the mundanes. If you go out of your way to freak the mundanes, occasionally you'll succeed, and the line between puckish and dickish very much depends on how tired the person having to deal with the assorted shenanigans is. And if someone thinks you're being a dick, sometimes they're a dick back.
I also think that being polite to police officers isn't so much respecting authority as common courtesy.
Heads they win; tails we lose
That seems like a good title for this post, too.
The trouble with cops being trained to be assertive, to dominate a situation, is that such behaviour is often bad policing. You may recall the "satanic ritual abuse" scares, fuelled by investigators forcing their own irrational model of events onto the children who were supposed to be the witnesses. Adults are less susceptible to such effects, but the assertiveness can taint the evidence. The witness can unconsciously echo the world image of the cop who is bearing down on him.
And "assertiveness" seems to be the fashion in the teaching of how to relate to people. People are encouraged to dominate any situation, and too often it pushes up the stakes. The goal shifts from getting a good result to being the alpha jerk.
And if everybody is somebody then nobody is anybody.
Are these low-bid cop-clones being taught how to back down? Are they being taught how to get out of the situation they've created?
You have control. Now what?
And if you're expected to be assertive (except with your boss), what does that do to your habits of ralationship. If you're force-fed the myth of assertiveness when you're at the bottom of the heap, how can you release the tension?
Presumably, some of these people are looking for the other on the internet. They have been conditioned to dominance, and cannot exercise that in the physical world of their work and their home. They need things they can class as being of lower status.
And a faceless victim on the internet slots in at the bottom of their warped pack structure.
Teresa at #8 writes:
> Is this warranted? You betcha. When these guys get to egging each on (they don't have a tenth the bravado when they're alone), they get so nasty that decent, thoughtful commenters are driven off.
Which just brought back a memory of the first or second flamefest I was ever caught in, long before there was a WWW, back when newsgroups ruled the world. A bunch of guys on one of the movie groups were having a great old time compiling a list of their favourite rape scenes from movies. I told them they were a bunch of loathsome little creeps, and was immediately reminded by them of their right to free speech. Which was all well and good, but a bit of a non-sequiter, not being relevant to the state of creep-hood.
Ah, humans...
Gods, I'm sounding like a broken record these days, but...
Sounds like a coupel of Zimbardan bad barrels here: the Park Police seem to have been cut loose from support mechanisms, told their area of responsibility is probably a prime target for "TEH TERR'STS", and get confronted by a counfounding situation... well, it's predictable what they'll do. The park may as well be the basement of Stanford College, 1971.
What it isn't is excusable, or unpreventable. Some support and reality checking from their paymasters could have gone a long way to helping them recognize that dancing teenagers probably > threat.
And the same bad barrel situation goes with most comment threads on teh intarwebs. Not only are commenters for the most part anonymous, the victims are also a faceless, anonymous group, as are the perpetrators. The lack of any possible reprecussion, the ability to indulge in classic cognitive dissonance fuelled denial, the whole damn thing allows, hell, encourages dehumanized and dehumanizing behaviour.
#8 ::: Teresa Nielsen Hayden :::
I would assume that what those folks really fear is the possibility that the authorities might be wrong, and that they (the posters) might be obligated to do something about it.
#32 ::: Kevin Andrew Murphy :::
Does asking why you're being told to disperse necessarily count as not being polite to the police?
The cop is a tubby man in a ridiculous uniform, riding around in a tiny vehicle that may as well be a clown car. His life as a cop isn’t turning out like it does in the movie and on TV, and he’s taking it out on anyone he can push around.
This looks to me like a claim that fat people are more likely to behave like assholes if they have authority.
tnh, #8: "This behavior is getting more and more common."
I think it's got to do with times getting harder and harder. It's also a kind of victim psychology and it scares me. Because it's a step closer to the kind of victim psychology that that makes people choose scapegoats and kill them, and it's becoming more common.
Randolph Fritz @ 39 Because it's a step closer to the kind of victim psychology that that makes people choose scapegoats and kill them, and it's becoming more common.
I'm afraid that you're already too late on that front. There's a set of quite clearly identified scapegoats already -- just that the killing's been mostly overseas.
So should we be surprised we finally see the same behavior in the US? No, we should be angry, and sad for our country for going down this well-traveled road, but not surprised. There's very little that happens "only in America."
'Finally,' Bruce?
I guess you missed McCarthyism? "There are 91 known perverts in the State Department" etc, not to mention the whole business with Emma Goldman amd anarchists back when. To tip icebergs, a little.
Only in America, perhaps, could someone say "finally" of authoritarianism openly displayed...
Ah, reminds me of the 60s. There I was in Washington Square Park with then boyfriend David (later husband.) We were listening to the music. Some people were dancing. It was a demonstration against closing the park to musicians.
Word was passed that the politzi were going to do a sweep at 1 o'clock so we were told we were to move orderly away a bit before that time. There were children playing in the fountain. No one wanted anyone to be hurt. The police had been notified about when we would leave.
About half an hour earlier, the police showed up in force, many on horseback. Billy clubs raised. They turned an orderly peaceful demonstration into a riot. Heads were bloodied. Some people (friends of mine) were arrested for "resisting" (running back to retrieve child from fountain).
These things are hardly new.
Jane
You missed one, Avram. David saying that those supporting the arrest don't really mean what they say: they're left-wing trolls who "don't like libertarians".
bellatrys @ 41
You are so right. I could claim that I really meant to say "it's been here, but we finally see it", but I'll cop to typing too fast and not thinking fast enough. I lived through McPolitics, and several of my relatives and their friends had to seek other employment as a result, so I should have made the connection. It does, however, just make the basic point stronger: the US is not different from other places in its ability to support and nurture totalitarianism.
My mother laughs when she hears about this kind of thing, because she grew up in the USSR, but I don't think it's funny at all. And I do agree with her that it isn't nearly as bad as it could be-- but that's now. When I am her age, it will be that bad, and there won't be anywhere to run.
I only wish I knew what I could do to stop it, besides signing petitions and such. I'll be old enough to vote this year, but that doesn't mean much, especially if the state I go to college in has electronic voting machines...
As for what they teach you in public schools: I thought I'd been brainwashed pretty thoroughly when I was a kid, but this made me wonder if I was hallucinating or something (unfortunately, other people heard this too, so it was real). The last time I saw my cousins, I asked the nine-year-old if she knew what the 1st Amendment was. "It's, like, um... well, the Founding Fathers, they voted on what you're not allowed to say, and that's what it is, right?"
Groups designed to prevent, or redress this sort of issue are perpetually decried by conservatives (not so much by libertarians) as liberal bleeding heart organizations. Civil Liberties law activist groups. Citizens complaint boards. Police watchdog groups.
It'd be really nice if Libertarians actually ideological party lines to side with liberals on these issues, but given how silent and inactive libertarian groups are on same sex marriage, voting rights groups and other liberal causes that conservatives just don't like, I don't see much of a change from the conservative leanings of libertarianism.
I really wish they'd wake up to the fact that, if they buck authority in any meaningful way, conservatives are going to go for their throats.
I don't mean this as a liberal criticizing libertarianism, I mean it as someone who's warning the libertarians that the conservative crowd they hang out with all the time will put a boot on their neck if given the chance. And that most liberals are probably going to be the ones who think that something ought to be done to prevent that.
Teresa writes:
If you let them go on talking that way for thread after thread, and keep count of all the things they insist are threatening (i.e., that frighten them), it's often a surprisingly long list.
I have noticed that, while the frequency and vehemence of authoritarian thinking has not diminished at all on the Internet, I encounter fewer and fewer of these sshls in real life. And I live in a very conservative part of the country.
It took a while to dawn on me what was going on, because I am a short, fat, sick old man, but I finally realized that one of the things authoritarians fear is me.
It seems to me that if you are recruiting police officers but aren't offering good enough money or other benefits to fill the ranks with cool-headed professionals, then you will end up attracting people who see the authority to brandish a weapon and boss around funny-looking people as one of the perks of the job.
Josh #46: Libertarians aren't monolithic, but I think you'll find them (and even fellow travelers/useful idiots like me) on the same side as you on quite a few of those issues. In fact, we often end up a little bitter when most of the liberals won't side with us on stuff like drug legalization, or when the "liberal" party in the US overwhelmingly votes for the Patriot Act, or for campaign finance reform that amounts to federal regulation of political speech, or continues to go along with the current administration's domestic spying and torture programs.
ISTM that the long association between Republicans and libertarians has been badly damaged by the last seven years. It's just *hard* to look at the Bush years as a commercial for how the Republicans are in favor of smaller, less powerful government, greater individual freedom, or even free markets (as opposed to rigging the game for your friends).
Albatross @49: there is no "liberal" party in the US. The Democratic party is a mildly authoritarian right-wing pro-business party that harbours a loud but powerless liberal minority faction, much as the Republican party harbours a loud but powerless libertarian minority faction.
(Unfortunately, given the way the US electoral system works, this is not an argument for voting for a third party.)
# 49 albatros - I was thinking more along the lines of liberal organizations. Perhaps I'm looking more at libertarian spokespeople than at libertarian rank and file.
It's heartening to hear that libertarians are waking up to the mistake of allying themselves with Bush and Company.
As for liberals siding with libertarians on drug policy, I think many do, and are annoyed when Democratic candidates vote conservatively on this. But the more liberal drug laws do come from liberal states with Democratic majorities.
In regards to the torture policy, I think you're wrong. Most of the Democratic party is against it. The one's who're for it are conservative Democrats.
I pointed this out to a friend, and about the first thing she said was that many people view deviation as a serious personal threat. So it could be taken here- anyone who acts odd in public is a potential threat, so should be clubbed down by the police.
And the posters will reflect this. In their heads, the equation goes something like "different from me" -> "weirdos" -> "must be doing something wrong" -> "smack them down".
No actual thought involved, more of a reflex action.
I was kicked off a monument in Washington in the late 1980s. But in that case, I don't have a complaint against the Park Police, who at that time behaved quite professionally.
I was in a college group that covered various folksongs and neo-folkie stuff in 4-part harmony with guitars. We were in DC on spring break, when our leader pointed up the steps and said "Joan Baez sang on those steps! Let's do it too!" So, on the spur of the moment, we headed up to the top of the steps, and arranged ourselves next to one of the outer columns near the corner of the memorial, and launched into a song. (We figured that was close enough to be visible, but far away enough not to disturb folks inside the memorial.)
We might have made it all the way through one song; in any case, we were near the end of either our first or second song, when, at a dramatic pause near the end, we saw someone in a ranger hat next to us looking at us, silently and pointedly shaking his head.
We stopped, and he was fine with telling us why we had to quit when we asked. Apparently, we needed a permit where we were at the top of the steps. He said who to call, and also pointed down to the sidewalk and terrace across the street by the Reflecting Pool, where we could continue our impromptu concert in front of, if not on, the Lincoln Memorial if we wanted to.
I haven't gone back to check permit requirements, but requiring one for an organized sound-making group of more than a dozen people on a national monument didn't seem unreasonable to me. There was no show or threat or force, though I have to admit that us being all white college students singing in broad daylight (and a whaling song at that) probably helped.
But that was in 1988 or 1989, a time when Washington seemed quite a bit less locked down, and perhaps better funded in its parks, than it is now. I'm very sad to see that our national gathering places are a lot more chilly nowadays.
Dave @ 34
And "assertiveness" seems to be the fashion in the teaching of how to relate to people.
Assertiveness isn't so bad, but these cops aren't actually assertive. They're aggressive; there's a big difference between the two. Assertiveness demonstrates that you won't be intimidated but doesn't escalate the situation, a refusal to step back; aggression is an attempt to intimidate others (often by frightened people) that always escalates things, a rapid step forward. Those cops come across to me like people who've never actually had it explained what assertiveness is, and are flailingly trying to manage it, under the impression that assertive people are people that nobody ever crosses.
Every instance of cop brutality I've seen in such posts, the cops were perfectly capable of acting assertively: they were dealing with unarmed opponents, whom they often outnumbered, and who were generally not doing anything more violent than demanding an explanation. A cop can be perfectly assertive in that situation without even raising his voice.
If somebody won't leave and there's four of you, you can walk him where you want him to go, or, if he won't cooperate, pick him up and carry him without hurting him at all. If somebody demands an explanation, rather than sticking with a circular 'I'm not answering your question because you're committing a crime / What crime? / I'm not answering that because you're asking me questions and you're a criminal', you can just explain plainly what's going to happen and why, and, if the other guy gets worked up, refuse to let it agitate you and say, 'I'm sorry, but this is the way it's going to go'. You can let the kid cheek you and carry on doing whatever you think you should be doing without getting distracted. For Pete's sake, you have a gun, backup and the power of the law on your side. Under those circumstances, you ought to feel a little more secure in your ability to get things done the way you want.
The trouble is, if you feel you have to control the situation to such an extent that even backchat, or perfectly polite questions, counts as an attempt to wrest control from you, then actually you've lost control of the situation entirely. Everything the person you're arresting does stops you in your tracks: you can't proceed until you've finished stamping out every last little bit of resistance - and basically, you've let yourself get dragged into an argument when you should be getting on with your job. All the time you're arguing about whether or not a kid should call you 'dude' is time you're not getting him to take his skateboard elsewhere, or whatever it is that idiot wanted done. It's a basic rule of controlling a conversation: don't rise to any bait the other guy throws out. If you stop mid-arrest to argue about the arrestee's tone of voice, you're actually letting the arrestee's actions be the ones that determine how the arrest is going to go. It's like up mercury bare-handed; the situation will break apart no matter how much you grab at it.
Of course, in all the examples here, the arrestees weren't even baiting the cops; they just wanted to know what was going on. Because, of course, that hysterical level of aggression is extremely intimidating; people start putting up resistance because they're both angry at being arrested unfairly and scared of being controlled by someone so untrustworthy. But it looks to me like men trying to act authoritative with only the dimmest idea of how that works. Those guys need better training. And a firing or ten.
Having visited the US, it doesn't just seem to be the cops; security guards are as bad. I got aggressed on every time I so much as stood near an area that was off limits, and they got extremely aggressive if I tried to explain that I wasn't going to go in. I learned pretty fast just to give them a wide berth. Those guys are like badly-trained guard dogs: if you get within their range, they'll attack you, and then panic if you scream and attack you more. The only thing to do is keep a chain's-length away from them.
My comment #12 was inspired by SJGames Illuminati: New World Order collectible trading card game.
Avram: Actually that last comment -- Only in this country can one march in the streets of the capital obnoxiously protesting "the oppression inherent in the system" without fear of retribution -- makes perfect sense in a different way. The commenter approves of the retribution; the kids should have fear. But they persist in not having that fear, which is what makes our crazy country so unique. See?
Francis, #29: From where I sit, Ron Paul's money-raising looks like it's driven by the same mechanism that drives televangelism and gambling -- poor people being willing to divert a surprising amount of their limited resources to something that promises Everything Will Be Different in the (indeterminate) future. I don't see a whole lot of difference between "when I hit the jackpot", "when the Savior comes", and "when the Libertarians come to power".
Kevin, #32: Exactly how is it "not being polite to police officers" to ask why you're being told to leave an area? Especially an area that's supposed to be open to the public 24/7?
HP, #47: Could you unpack that a bit more, please? It sounds interesting, but I'm not sure I'm following you.
I've been known to say that as far as I can tell about 40% of cops became cops because they fundamentally like to rough people up, and they can get away with it if they're cops. Since abusus non tollit usum, that doesn't mean all cops are bad, but it does mean there are a lot of bad cops.
FrancisT 29: Not as rich as creosote
Did you maybe mean Croesus? Creosote is a toxic substance, not a wealthy person.
I like the fact (and I wish it went on just a trifle longer) that the cop is suddenly worried about the camera being on, but didn't have the brains to try and remove it.
I sure as hell hope he gets grief for that.
Contempt of cop is always risky, because they as a group, are possessed both of immediate power (resisting an unlawful arrest is a crime), and, pretty much, are their own oversight authority.
Cheap video has changed that, somewhat, but as the cop abusing the kid in the first clip shows, they don't have the sense that they have to answer to anyone, and believe they have the right quash oversight by the people they are supposed to be serving.
I'm not one to use the,"I pay your salary" argument very often, but cops are one case where whom they serve is of paramount importance, the fact they are supposed to serve the public, and the ideals of the public they serve are (so we keep being told) against the sort of arbitary instantiations of powe as are shown here matters.
I wish the idiot had called the kids mother; and that she was savvy, because my mother would have handed him his lunch, at the precint, with a lawyer, and a copy of the tape.
All hail YouTube.
One could write a fairly comprehensive textbook on logical fallacies using the material the anti-dancer/pro-cop side of the argument has provided over there.
Lee #57: Is this one of those verbs that gets conjugated based on who you are? I donate money to unpopular but worthy causes, you get talked into sending cash to silly movements that make you feel good, he gets conned out of his lunch money by crackpots.
ISTM it would be hard to distinguish between people who sent their money to Kustinich and people who sent their money to Paul, in terms of likelihood of victory.
Lee: I have know well to do libertarians. I have know several rich reactionaries who identify as libertarians.
Eugene Volokh isn't hurting, neither is his family. They are Libertarians.
Nancy Lebovitz (#38) re fat people: I didn't read it that way. I saw it as saying a person whose idea of what was supposed to be (him a trim guy; fit, and in a snappy uniform, driving around in a sharp looking cruiser stopping real crimes) being at variance with what is (he's a bit stout, in a silly uniform (those colors, the short's and t-shirt, and a ridiculous looking car) causes compsenational behaviors.
The telling line to me was the bit about how saying, "dude" was "disrepecting" (lord, how I that verbification) him, the uniform, his badge, and his department.
It was about his feeling vulnerable. That somehow his copness needed to be defended.
Teresa's comment about the "tough guy" attitude on the net being at variance with real "tough guys" is apropos to this guy. He seems to feel that every interaction requires that he prove to the world that he's a real cop.
Charlie Stross (#50): I signed a ballot initiative petition (to qualify the proposed measure for referendum) yesterday, which might have the effect of making third party candidates (for national office) more viable in Calif. At the very least it will make seats more competitive, and that can't be a bad thing, because as it presently is, most of Calif., is a bit left of the national center, and the delgation to Congress is more than a bit right.
Some of those Right, are more than just a bit right, but rabidly so (and one of them a semi-closeted homosexual, the irony, it burns).
Kit: Dead bang on assertive. I've been hassled by people who think they can tell me I can't take pictures. Usually they threaten to call the cops. I ask if they want to use my phone (the local cops are in it, already). That usually calms things down. That I am willing to call the cops makes it plain I think I'm solidly in the clear.
The group of college kids who threatend to come smash my gear were told that would get them arrested; and I had my phone in my hand. All I had to do was hit talk. Since it was the local number, not 911, it would have had the police (who were always near that location) there before the kids could have gotten away.
Had I started yelling, or otherwise agressively threatening them; things might have gotten ugly.
Xopher @58:
Did you maybe mean Croesus? Creosote is a toxic substance, not a wealthy person.
Pratchett reference.
Doctor Science (16), I would have pegged it as a predominantly male behavior, but that may be a matter of where I hang out.
Mary Dell (18): Does that exist? Am I looking in the wrong places? Am I missing the joke?
Julia (22): Yes. One of the things I find most frightening about all the security rhetoric is how little money and effort go into the actual security. Denying security employees Civil Service status is of a piece with cutting military benefits while there's a war going on. Pre-9/11 baggage and security checkers were abominably underpaid, badly treated, and generally ignored. Now they're getting more scrutiny, so they're getting more pay and better uniforms; but they're still on a mushroom-growing regimen.
Where your money isn't, your heart isn't either.
It costs far less to buy a presidency than to give up the post-Cold War peace dividend. Cost-cutting enthusiasts provide cover for cuts in already-mingy social programs. Meanwhile, the real rivers of money run elsewhere, and are being rerouted into controlled-access buried conduits.
FrancisT (26), I think you're assuming that all policing is of equal quality. Having more resources means you can pay better salaries and benefits, which attracts better employees in the first place, and helps you retain high-quality, experienced personnel who'd have no trouble finding other work outside the service. Having more resources also enables security forces to give their people more and better training to start with, and ongoing monitoring and additional training thereafter, which increases the odds that they'll bring thoughtful, nuanced responses to new situations. Finally, it's easier to maintain morale and ideals when your people aren't obviously being regarded as interchangeable and ultimately disposable units.
Lee (28), don't let go of that one. I think you're on to something big.
Dave Bell (34):
"Presumably, some of these people are looking for the other on the internet. They have been conditioned to dominance, and cannot exercise that in the physical world of their work and their home. They need things they can class as being of lower status."And a faceless victim on the internet slots in at the bottom of their warped pack structure."You got it. They have a desperate need to feel dominant, and no natural gift for it.
The right understands the terrible hunger these people have to win arguments, dominate the situation, and be the smart person in the room. That's why they feed them fake talking points that make them feel smart and powerful. As I've said before, the most important characteristic of Rush Limbaugh is that he always wins arguments, even if it means his crew has to cut off his opponent in mid-sentence. That's why his fans identify with him.
If you do takedowns on these guys -- go through their points in order, disassembling their arguments and correcting their facts -- what you most often get back in return is resentment and anger, then a defense of their motives, then withdrawal. You seldom get an argument on points. Their internal experience of the transaction is what matters most to them, not the truth or falsity of external facts.
I try not to think things like "Either they're aliens, or I am." They can't just be aliens. I have to understand them.
I like the Florence Ambrose. Looks like she understands Davy Crockett's trick of grinning a bear to death.
Steve Taylor (36): Yes! They always invoke freedom of speech. Do read the Boing Boing moderation guidelines -- you can find the fossil remains of these same arguments all over it. What they're talking about is their own right to say whatever they want, in whatever style and language they choose, in any context; to which I can only reply, "Pick two."
Actually, I can say more than that. My initial argument was that what freedom of speech actually means is that you're free to have what you want and say what you want on your own website. Since we have the same right on our own websites, removing or disemvowelling their more offensive comments isn't suppressing their freedom of speech; it's exercising our own.
More recently, I've taken to point out that if all freedom of speech means to them is their freedom to say anything they want in whatever fashion they want, they've already got it. They can go stand out in the middle of any vacant lot, or post onto any unlinked website, and say what's on their minds. At the point that they want more than that -- a specific context, say, or a specific audience -- they're talking about a social transaction, which puts them back in the world where we share our toys, take turns, and say please and thank you.
They don't like that line of reasoning.
Peter Darby (37):
"And the same bad barrel situation goes with most comment threads on teh intarwebs. Not only are commenters for the most part anonymous, the victims are also a faceless, anonymous group, as are the perpetrators. The lack of any possible repercussion, the ability to indulge in classic cognitive-dissonance-fuelled denial, the whole damn thing allows, hell, encourages dehumanized and dehumanizing behaviour."Insofar as I have the power to stop it, I will not let that happen. If I can't stop it, I'll do my best to keep it out of areas that I administer, so that other people can be heard and other conversations can take place.
I wish there were something I could do for those guys. I like to think that some of them come back under other names and join the conversation. Maybe I'm kidding myself, but I do like to imagine that some of them notice I've made a place where it's safe to be civil. There's so little beyond that I can do to help them.
Nancy Lebovitz (38):
"I would assume that what those folks really fear is the possibility that the authorities might be wrong, and that they (the posters) might be obligated to do something about it."Maybe so. What I would have said is that they don't much care who's right or wrong, and that they fear two things: that the powers-that-be might come after them, and that the rules of the game might change. They're unsatisfied and unsuccessful members of a privileged class, and the status quo is most of what they've got going for them. They worry about that. I think the fear of being tunbled out into the harsh light of the real world is what turns some of them into survivalists.
Josh Jasper (46): If there were one thing I could wish the left and the libertarians understood as well as the right does, it's how to work with people who agree with you on some but not all issues. The right is great at it.
As Albatross points out later in the thread, it's got to take some remarkable mental convolutions to convince yourself that the current administration has anything to do with free-market economics. I continue to think that Lee (28) is on to something. Part of what's always bothered me about liberterians is the simplicity of their models. When the rich and the powerful talk about how the system works, stuff like decision-making strategies, they don't sound anything like libertarians.
HP (47), I'm with you on that one. It used to bother me when I heard that people feared me. Now my default reaction is, "Not nearly enough."
Seth Gordon (48), you get some of those in any job that has police authority, whatever the wages. As I understand it, what you mostly get if you pay low wages are people who can't get good jobs for other reasons, and are attracted by the prospect of long-term stable employment, regular raises, a pension plan, and more respect than they'd get from other jobs that are available to them. You'll get some good employees, a lot of timeservers, and some jokers who'd be bad news in any organization.
Of course, if the job isn't rated as Civil Service, the promise of long-term stable employment, regular raises, and a dependable pension plan goes out the window. It's not the way you want to treat people who have that much short-term situational power.
Guthrie (52), conservatives tend to be people who respond to situations with fear. I mean that literally. I believe someone's done a study, or possibly more than one study.
Kit (54): Excellent points.
"..if the other guy gets worked up, refuse to let it agitate you and say, 'I'm sorry, but this is the way it's going to go'."Yup. That's the very heart of it. As my smart bosses back at the Financial Aid Office put it, "If you get to the point where you're saying 'you this' and 'you that' to the students, your interaction has already gone wrong." Needless to say, that point comes before you get into anything an outside party would call an argument. The real problem is the "me vs. you" outlook. You're not there as you. You're there as a representative of the law. The proper stance is "you, this law or policy, and this response or consequence."
"The trouble is, if you feel you have to control the situation to such an extent that even backchat, or perfectly polite questions, counts as an attempt to wrest control from you, then actually you've lost control of the situation entirely. Everything the person you're arresting does stops you in your tracks: you can't proceed until you've finished stamping out every last little bit of resistance - and basically, you've let yourself get dragged into an argument when you should be getting on with your job. All the time you're arguing about whether or not a kid should call you 'dude' is time you're not getting him to take his skateboard elsewhere, or whatever it is that idiot wanted done. It's a basic rule of controlling a conversation: don't rise to any bait the other guy throws out."Again, dead right. The way I learned it is that you have a script for the conversation, and the other guy does too. Make sure you stick to yours. Rising to the bait, letting yourself be distracted, stopping to argue, et cetera, are all entrypoints that get you into his or her script, and out of your own.
They're getting their training from that famous police manual, To Protect and Serve Man.
re: libertarian incomes - of course, now that I read the other examples in the thread, I remember that there is a strain of poor libertarians. But the Penn Gilette type is the one I always think of - the ultra-rich "I've got mine, so you don't need help" kind, which is the only kind I've ever come in contact with. Possibly depends on whether you're a coastal or a heartland libertarian?
Xopher @ 58, re: FrancisT @ 29 - except on the Discworld. I thought everyone here was a Terry Pratchett fan!
Teresa (64) - If there were one thing I could wish the left and the libertarians understood as well as the right does, it's how to work with people who agree with you on some but not all issues. The right is great at it.
I look at them like I do expert salespeople in an industry that's selling useless crap. They're really, really good at convincing people they need something, even if they really don't.
Like convincing low income folks that deregulating the power industry and removing market watchdogs is important and good for the economy, then somehow blaming stuff like the Enron crisis on liberals.
That said, I think the left is getting better at PR. Organizations like Move On are doing really well. I look forward to seeing what they do with McCain vs. whoever the Dem candidate is.
Julia #22 -- Did I say anywhere that you were applauding civil liberties violations?
As far as libertarians and the Department of Homeland Security goes, most of the libs I know were against creating the department in the first place. Here's Radley Balko, senior editor of Reason, writing about it in 2005. And many of them were against it in part because they knew it would be yet another screwed-up boondoggle.
I think that at least some police overreaction is due to fear. It reminds me of the first time I ran a role-playing game.
I was terrified that my players would venture into territory that I hadn't prepared, or would do something that I wasn't able to handle. So I squelched them whenever they seemed to be going off of the rails on which I'd laid the plot. Really, it's a wonder they didn't lynch me.
It was only later that I could relax and trust my improvisational skills. Then I gave my players more rope, and we all had a better time.
But an undertrained cop in an underfunded department, knowing there isn't much backup available, unsure he could handle what these unpredictable civilians might do next? Scared spitless, I bet, and desperately trying to keep the interaction in controlled, known territory. And frightened people overreact, on both sides, until the situation snowballs. Then the next time, the cop knows to come down hard, fast, because these things really do spiral out of control.
It takes confidence to take risks, to reach out and be friendly. You have feel safe, and know you've got backup. These guys don't, and they know it, and they're scared to death*.
(This is not to say that some cops don't get off on power. But there are other reasons to do what they do, reasons that can be addressed with mundane things like resources and support.)
-----
* sometimes theirs, sometimes others'
Oops. Not as big a Pratchett fan as others. Sorry.
So is there some nationally known media outlet that has a regular "Stupid Cop Tricks" or "Security Theater" feature? I ask because I don't watch much cable newsotainment or read many shiny infoadzines. Perhaps somebody's submissions department might enjoy this one.
TNH: What they're talking about is their own right to say whatever they want, in whatever style and language they choose, in any context
There is a certain subclass of these people who spend a lot of time complaining about how their feelings have been hurt by somebody else's nasty comment. But still, they get to say whatever they want.
To answer Lee #57 "Exactly how is it "not being polite to police officers" to ask why you're being told to leave an area? Especially an area that's supposed to be open to the public 24/7?" and Nancy #38 "Does asking why you're being told to disperse necessarily count as not being polite to the police?"
The key word for Nancy's question: "necessarily"? No. But "possibly"? Yes.
For Lee's question, may I ask a few rhetorical questions myself? Is it possible to ask a rude question? To adopt a sneering tone? To badger someone with the same question they've already answered again and again and again? Huh? Huh? Huh?
I'm having flashbacks to the time I did long-term substitute teaching and I made the mistake of agreeing to take the "basic math" class, which was the misleading name the administrators gave to the room where they stuffed all the kids no one else wanted in their classroom: Jimmy-Needs-More-Ritalin, Johnny-Came-to-School-Stoned-Again, half a dozen gang kids, etc.
I got a lot of questions from those kids, and most of those questions weren't because someone wanted answers but because they were wanting to test boundaries, push them, and engage in various social dominance behaviors.
Which is not to say that the cop could not have acted badly, or that some others weren't, just that I'm not going to automatically side with the Libertarian in the question just on second-hand reports from the blogosphere.
There's also the fact that some things need modification based on circumstances. For a number of years I did vampire LARPS with friends in San Francisco and Berkeley. We had a number of visitors from other cities, including ones from DC, and we got told about "the Thumb." What is "the Thumb" pray tell? Well, to play out the combats, people would do Rock-Paper-Scissors, but for extra rules for high-level strength tests, White Wolf had added "the Bomb," a hand sign consisting of a fist with an upraised thumb.
The Shadows on the Mall game in DC starting having some trouble with the local cops overhearing gamers shouting "I throw The Bomb!" and so "The Bomb" was redubbed to "The Thumb." The DC storytellers also let us in on various bits of post 9-11 twitchiness they were having to deal with and how to get things worked out.
If you're going to have a spontaneous flash mob dancing silently with their iPods to honor the spirit of Jefferson, reenacting select scenes from The Crucible, or dressing up in black lace and playing Rock-Paper-Scissors until they declare one of them King of the Vampires, the sensible thing to do is to have some well-mannered spokesman for the group go act as liason to the mundanes, particularly the cops.
No, you're not legally required to do so, but it's sensible and polite, and the point of village greens and other areas open to the public 24/7 is that they're there for the enjoyment of all the public, not just you.
Teresa @#64:
Mary Dell (18): Does that exist? Am I looking in the wrong places? Am I missing the joke?
That's a joke. At least, I hope so! I was just fondly remembering the way trolls got herded into special pens on usenet.
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Remember what Jerome K. Jerome had to say about how Germans regarded their own police:
"The policeman is to him a religion, and, one feels, will always remain so. In England we regard our man in blue as a harmless necessity. By the average citizen he is employed chiefly as a signpost, though in busy quarters of the town he is considered useful for taking old ladies across the road. Beyond feeling thankful to him for these services, I doubt if we take much thought of him.
"In Germany, on the other hand, he is worshipped as a little god and loved as a guardian angel. To the German child he is a combination of Santa Clans and the Bogie Man. All good things come from him: Spielplatze to play in, furnished with swings and giant-strides, sand heaps to fight around, swimming baths, and fairs. All misbehaviour is punished by him.
"It is the hope of every well-meaning German boy and girl to please the police. To be smiled at by a policeman makes it conceited. A German child that has been patted on the head by a policeman is not fit to live with; its self-importance is unbearable.
"The German citizen is a soldier, and the policeman is his officer."
Creepy -- especially when you think of what became of Germany after Jerome wrote that (in 1900).
Lee 57: HP, #47: Could you unpack that a bit more, please? It sounds interesting, but I'm not sure I'm following you.
I'll try.
I used to be a target for all kinds of conservative/authoritarian condescension and speechifying. This peaked sometime around the 2000 election fiasco. Around the same time, the conservative blogosphere started to take off, and after 9/11, went full-blown insane. Meanwhile, my actual face-to-face encounters were growing rarer and rarer.
By the time of the 2004 election fiasco, I was walking around with a chip on my shoulder, fully expecting some authoritarian to open his mouth, giving me an opening. And instead, . . . /*crickets*/.
And yet, it was clear from their frothing presence on the Internet that the RWAs hadn't gone anywhere. They just no longer open their mouths when in the same physical space as me.
Now, the odd thing is that I haven't changed all that much. I've never been terribly good at communicating politics, and my verbal reaction to authoritarians to this day tends toward spittle-flecked gibbering.
The one thing that has changed is my understanding of the role that fear plays in the conservative/authoritarian mindset. Perhaps there's something in my body language that suggests to these thugs that I know how scared they are. In any event, I find that conservatives rarely bother to tell me what they think anymore, unless they happen to be safely shielded behind miles and miles of cable.
Has anyone else had similar experiences?
Joel @ 65: "Stop!" he yelled. "IT'S A TUPPERWARE MANUAL!"
I think libertarians are people who don't believe that humans are social animals -- as per Margaret Thatcher's "there's no such thing as society"[1]. They may be people who don't feel all that connected to others, through circumstance or brain chemistry, or they may be people who don't *want* to feel particularly connected to others, or they may want to reject the feeling of connectedness because it's so messy, complicated, and vague.
The trouble with such people on the Internet is that it's good for some of them and bad for others. Some develop connetions more easily than they can in face-to-face interactions, but others become, basically, wargs.
[1] "there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." *Baboons* have more layers of social organization than that. The problem I have with libertarianism isn't that it's moral or immoral, it's that it's *incorrect*.
Doctor 78: If only the worst thing about Mad Maggie had been that she was incorrect! She's on my ever-shortening "dance with joy when they die" list.
Doctor Science @ 78 -
I think libertarians are people who don't believe that humans are social animals -- as per Margaret Thatcher's "there's no such thing as society"[1].
...
Y'know, I think it's time for me to take a break from Making Light for a while.
The idea that Mad Maggie was a Libertarian is absurd. Please tell me you didn't mean that, Doctor Science.
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