Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[Mictlantecuhtli]

The Ferguson results on twitter are astonishing.


https://twitter.com/AntonioFrench/status/500021221392936961/photo/1

Remind me not to try to calm crowds down. Oh good, she's even a pastor. The entire police force leadership need to be put in holding prison until their trials for abusing their power. This police force is a direct threat to the safety of the city. They're so haphazard I feel like they're going to start killing people if they get more desperate.


And I'm usually lenient with ridiculously stupid forces. This is excessive in every meaning of the word.

[Loud Whispers]

I'd say excessive is an understatement.
I mean, seriously? It's a protest and they gear up as if a revolution's taking place.

I always joked that the difference between an American police state and a British one would be that the British would kill you with a microscopic drone and the Americans would roll a terminator on a tank chassis into your living room.

[smirk]

Military vets condemning the police display. Essentially, calling it "militarization" is being too nice; the police have almost no real military training and they're far too over-equipped with the wrong tools for the job. It's more like a play-acting scenario gone terribly out of control.


Also: Anonymous did, in fact, accuse the wrong man of being Michael Brown's murderer. Can't say I'm too surprised.

[Loud Whispers]

Anonymous is not a thing that can be blamed, no more than you can blame the colour red for fascism.

[Descan]

Aye, as my post earlier said, Anonymous is a label, not an organization. Anyone with 2 bits to rub together can call themselves "Anonymous."

[Criptfeind]

Which of course makes the statement that "Anonymous did, in fact, accuse the wrong man of being Michael Brown's murderer." Perfectly accurate.

[GavJ]

Anonymous is not a thing that can be blamed, no more than you can blame the colour red for fascism.

Anonymous is a group of people, who do things, that they can be blamed for... so of course it can be blamed.
I'm not sure by what twisted logic you are comparing it to a physical constant of 400nm wavelength.

[Bauglir]

Not to be overly antagonistic, but the primary line of Anonymous rhetoric is that everyone's wrong about what it is, and LW seems to subscribe pretty heavily to it.

[Loud Whispers]

Not to be overly antagonistic, but the primary line of Anonymous rhetoric is that everyone's wrong about what it is, and LW seems to subscribe pretty heavily to it.

Because it's right
Anonymous is a concept that's been turned into a group even less well defined than terrorists.

[Descan]

Just that individual people are culpable, but Anonymous as a whole can't really be blamed for the actions of people who call themselves Anonymous, because there *is* no whole. There's no internal policing because there is no internals. There's no accountability. You can't blame an anon for the actions of another anon, any more than I can blame a Christian for, say, the WBC, or the Crusades.

Other anons might have known it was wrong, but they wouldn't have been able to stop it being released any more than they could stop the sun shining.

[nenjin]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/ferguson-missouri-police-shooting.html?_r=0

Governor has had Missouri State Police step in to relieve the St. Louis County police of its security responsibilities in Ferguson.

About fucking time.

I hope the State Patrol operates the same way it dose here. They're appointed directly by the governor, usually on merit.

That still may or may not change anything, 'cause it's Missouri after all. But at least someone else is calling the shots over there now, ostensibly.

This is really the end result of the massive overfunding of law enforcement post-9/11 in the Bush years. Not only did police become more paranoid and willing to use deadly force, they had millions of dollars of new toys to play with too. While I doubt this will have any real impact on the militarization of police in this country, I'm honestly glad it's on display. The rioters are responsible for their actions, but the outright suppression of the public and the media is what really chills my blood here. So the more everyone gets a good look at what a police state looks like, the more they'll have to think about their role in supporting it or not.

[Loud Whispers]

Probably more accurate to say this is the end of massive overfunding of law enforcement post-Snowden, the spotlights are on and the Americans are unlikely to forget. First milestone.

[GavJ]

Anonymous as a whole can't really be blamed for the actions of people who call themselves Anonymous, because there *is* no whole.

The whole is obviously the sum of the parts. If a group has done overall bad things (I don't know if anonymous does overall do bad things, just for sake of argument), and then you voluntarily identify yourself later as part of that group, you are endorsing/condoning their actions in the proportions that they occurred. You take on the overall reputation by joining them.

If I called myself a Nazi, would you just be like "Oh cool, no problem with that, mate. Because there is no overarching organization anymore, and so you can't be associated or blamed with the historical group." Lol, no. Of course people would look down on me and rightly so.

Acting like this is some sort of magical entity that doesn't work like every other group label in the world is silly.

[Darvi]

Pointless Godwin is pointless. The action of a single person (or several) don't count for the entire group, especially if said group's single defining characteristic is anonymity.

[EnigmaticHat]

Nazies WERE organized.  That's why even modern people who call themselves Nazies, aren't really Nazies in any meaningful sense.