The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Kit:

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.

I think it was always clear to the rest of the world that the main reason to invade Iraq was to take out some post-911 aggression. That's one of the reasons the UN told Bush not to.

Hi Dave (92). My point is that few nations mythologise armed struggle the way America does, or at least, few European ones, which is where I am, because they're less central to the country's self-image - they could still call themselves countries before it happened. I don't know whether that's because of the circumstances of the actual historical War of Independence itself or because the 'we won so now we're independent' principle was written into the Constitution or because tales tend to grow in the telling, but the notion of war seems to have a symbolic importance that makes it, if not a more violent society, a society that's particularly prone to the redemptive-violence idea. At least, that's how it looks from over here. I think I'm with Sam Kelly (93) on this.

Hi Dave 85.
You say: 'Britain 1642,1688, (and hence the English-speaking ex-colonies) France 1787, Italy 1870, Russia 1917, Germany 1918, most of South America (various dates from 1818 on). Many others.'

Those aren't founding incidents of violence. Every country has violence in its past, but America declared itself a nation based on a revolution. Britain, Russia, France and so on were already nations when they had those uprisings. As a result, they don't have all that 'born in struggle against evil' stuff hardwired into their sense of themselves as countries in quite the same way America does. That's why, for instance, they don't have all that 'right to bear arms' stuff. America's circumstances are kind of unusual.

Ah well, I stand corrected. Sorry JH, I'm so mad at those soldiers I'm probably not at my clearest-headed. Thank you for pointing out my confusion without laughing too loudly; it's nice to see an energetic discussion that stays polite.

Actually the Stanford experimenters told the 'guards' nothing except that they had to keep order. The massive harassment of prisoners, they came up with by themselves. Milgram tested obedience to orders, Stanford tested how roles can allow you to resign personal responsibility.

JH Woodyatt 56 - you are not the good guys. Sorry, but you're just not. Bush started an illegal war based on a pack of lies, and smashed the country up without any good plans to build it up again that didn't involve profiteering. As far as Iraq goes, you are not the good guys, you're a pirate ship.

This is part of America's problem: Americans seem incapable of conceiving of themselves as the bad guys, which makes them feel fine about doing any number of bad things. You have got to stop calling yourselves the good guys: it makes it easier for America to f*ck over other countries without questioning whether it's justified. Saying 'we're still the good guys' is part of the problem.

In this war, as in plenty of wars, there are no good guys, just different groups of bad guys. America is one of them.

I agree with John Stanning: these soldiers are nasty pieces of work. But if you're going to prosecute a 'just' war with any serious purpose, you have to remember that the population contains a certain proportion of vicious or potentially individuals who, given the right conditions, will metastasize into full-blown sadists.

The Stanford prison experiment is a case in point: not all the 'guards' tormented the 'prisoners' - some were disciplinarian but fair, some did them favours, and some were brutal bullies. If you see footage of the volunteers afterwards, the most frightening thing is seeing the worst 'guard', nicknamed 'John Wayne', talking to the people he tormented. He was in no way sorry. He thought he'd done nothing wrong. Why? Because the circumstances were unusual and he could blame them. It's clear from his demeanour that because he did it in an isolated context, it had no bearing on how he saw himself as a person. This was a person who simply didn't understand that he was a bad man - because circumstances let him indulge his vicious tastes and then write them off.

Sound like being at war?

Tormenting those children, or torturing people at Abu Ghraib, or any of the other horrible things people have been doing, are not acts of war. They're acts of sadism, perpetrated in a situation where the presence of the war allows the sadists to dissociate their actions from their personalities, do wicked things without feeling like wicked people.

If you're going to war, you should know that. And then you should make it known that you will punish the f*ck out of any soldier who tries it. Soldiers need to learn not to torment children along with how to load a rifle, for strategic, let's-not-fight-this-war-again-in-a-generation's-time-when-the-children-get-big reasons as well as for humanitarian ones. Any army worth the name should be concerned about keeping control of its soldiers, and ... oh man, I'm trying to find a way of saying you don't torment children, you just don't that sounds rational, but I'm too outraged to think of it. Armies should be set up to prevent this kind of thing. I don't care what excuses people make. This shit shouldn't happen, and it should be possible to prevent, and if it's difficult you should be trying harder.

Completely agree with you, Greta.

As far as correcting flaws goes - my instinctive response to that, having seen that horrible scene, was somewhere between 'I'm going to cry' and 'somebody needs to kill those soldiers'. That, in its sordid, petty way, was such an undilutedly wicked act that there was a moment when I really wanted them dead. My apologies to their families; I don't really, I was just blind angry. However:

I'm sitting comfortably in a house with working taps in a Western country. And I was ill-wishing them with a vengeance. What does this suggest they're saying in Iraq?

Look at the tenacity of the poor kid who chased them all that way. Five years from now he's going to be a lot bigger. If he's still that tenacious, I think they'll find he's chasing the car with a weapon.

What is wrong with the training of these soldiers? These are obviously stupid, bored kids who are under the impression that if you do it to funny little foreigners who can't retaliate it's not real bullying - but if soldiers can be taught not to desert their posts or get drunk on duty, they can be taught not to antagonise the local population of a country they're supposed to be reconstructing. If Vietnam proved anything it proved that it's almost impossible to manage a country where everybody hates you. Iraq is never going to be resolved as long as the soldiers who are supposed to be pacifying the population keep provoking it. For fun.

This isn't just evil and cruel, it's horrifically bad strategy. It's things like that - and given that they filmed it for a laugh, that suggests that incidents like that are a normal recreation - going to stretch out the war and get more and more people killed on both sides. Those soldiers are signing a lot of death warrants with their little joke.

I keep thinking of Henry V:

...his soul
Shall stand sore-charged for the wasteful vengeance
That shall fly with them: for many a thousand widows
Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands;
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down...
His jest will savour but of shallow wit
When thousands weep more than did laugh at it.

Probably that makes me a latte-drinking-untenured-radical-liberal. I still think I'm right, though.

The cop sez:

'In this line of business, you have to have a thick skin.'

How does he square that with the fact that he electrocutes somebody for getting on his nerves? This is a man who can't take any kind of frustration at all. If he'd had a thicker skin, he would have kept his head and refrained from tasering the kid.

Let's review the article: he shot someone, he choked someone with a nightstick, he tasered someone five times for lying down.

That's three counts of potentially murderous assault with three different dangerous objects.

This man is a classic example of a lethally dangerous type: the armed coward. I say again: why in the name of all that's holy was this man allowed weapons?

The outstanding thing about the video is the incredible cowardice of the guards. They could easily have picked him up and carried him out, for example, but hey, he might have struggled and kicked one of their shins. Bruised shin for me? Someone else screaming in pain? Heck, I think I'll use my taser.

I wouldn't say that they consciously decided that, but they clearly didn't have the skill or courage to handle a difficult situation without resorting to horrible violence. If they'd been calm and firm, even an agitated student would have left without incident. It looks to me like a situation that got horrendously out of control because the guards were, at bottom, panicking.

But if you can't take backchat without reaching for your taser, you shouldn't have a taser. Those men were unfit for the positions of authority they occupied. Who the heck gives these people such terrible weapons?

I agree with A.R. Yngve on the 'us versus them' issue. From an outsider's perspective, I think the problem isn't to do with who governs that particular state, it's to do with American guard behaviour. I recently travelled through America and the campus guards' behaviour, while it infuriates me, doesn't surprise me. In different states I found the same thing: a hair-triggered authoritarianism from anyone in a position of authority, an aggressive anybody-I-don't-know-is-one-of-the-bad-guys paranoia.

For instance: going through customs check in Los Angeles airport, I walked through the gate, carried on a few paces, then paused to wait for my boyfriend, who was still at the desk. About three seconds after I stopped walking, a guard stood up and ordered me to move on, with the air of a man speaking to a prisoner the day after a riot rather than an airport official speaking to a customer. I explained that I was just waiting for my boyfriend to get past the desk (it was a big airport and I didn't want to disappear on him) ... well, the guard got extremely aggressive, with a 'don't you try anything' attitude, as if I was being threatening. He didn't physically threaten me, but if I'd shouted at him (which I certainly felt like doing as he was being, from an international perspective, astonishingly, gratuitously rude), I can easily see the incident escalating. It was the same in New York - stand anywhere near somewhere they didn't want you to be, even if you weren't trying to go in, and you'd be pounced on; explain that you didn't mean any harm, and you?d be smacked down for backchat.

Small incidents - but, if you're used to countries where they don't happen, very, very menacing.

A big section of American officialdom as I experienced it seemed to have this aggression towards the non-uniformed that shocked me - and I'd just travelled through Japan, where train drivers offer to resign if they get thirty seconds behind schedule. The whole attitude was, 'I don't know you, so I'm going to assume you're the bad guy till you go away.' I'm not at all surprised they started torturing this guy and threatening his fellow students. American security staff seem to be fundamentally frightened of strangers. And if they don't know you, more or less anything that calls you to official attention marks you as a threat, and one you're marked as a threat, anything at all that you do only makes things worse.

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