I'm excavating this post from one of our many shooter threads, because it got buried with no response. I think it deserved some attention. Achtung! In the USA, we're now in the process of an election that will have considerable global consequences. Because US politics remain uniquely vulnerable to another terrorism-provoked stampede toward reactionary militarism, toward unprecedented levels of public surveillance, and toward the undoing of due process, nothing is certain. Our often mindless reactionism is most conspicuously in evidence every time there is another violent episode in the USA. At a time when the USA has provoked retaliation like never before, we had better think some issues through before there is another highly-spectacular criminal provocation, or series thereof, designed to cause fateful measures to be taken without rational collective thought and debate. I hate the ghoulishness of shooter threads. But sometimes, I have a deep need to strike at the belly of the Beast, even if I come up short. Read the whole post, and you may understand. I'd like to second Nasor's thoughts about the overplaying of the shooter threat, and take the implications of magnified threat a little bit further. You may find this disturbing to follow, even if you've already thought seriously about what I'm hoping to relate here. Something is emerging in USAmerican society that is infinitely more ominous than any imitative acting-out among young murderer-suiciders. US educational institutions are becoming the prototypes and incubators of a radically new society. There really is a New American Century struggling to be born, and it's unlike any that came before. Those of us who love freedom in the USA are heading for the fight of our lives, and the fight of our nation's life. We are fast transitioning into new and Orwellian era on USAmerican campuses: A surveillance and security culture is emerging that is on track to surpass the profundity of the police states we loathed as our enemies, and the enemies of freedom in the last century. This burgeoning security culture is changing our society more swiftly than the Iron Curtain did Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe, a surveillance culture descended like an enormous weight upon freedom. Although popularly resented, the pervasive Soviet security apparatus gradually, but radically altered perceptions and relationships throughout every society in its shadow. Macro-psychological shocks administered directly by Soviet troops, the KGB, and satellite-state security agencies had a withering effect on free expression, on human confidence, on empathy, and on happiness. A similarly profound change is right now getting underway in US society. But this societal shift is stealthier; more targeted. More effective. At the most formative time in early adulthood, young USAmericans are being immersed in a new way of life, where privacy is surrendered with hardly a second thought, and scarcely a whimper (much less outcry) of protest. Higher Education means highly suggestible times for young USAmericans. Post-9-11 is also a highly suggestible period for our country as a whole- we're still unbalanced by rational dissonance over perceived and media-amplified threats. The USA is now embroiled in the fight of our nation's life that is certain to become as profound as the Civil War and the Civil Rights eras. Liberty has lost a lot of ground while few USAmericans have taken notice. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes how traumatic events serve as a vehicle for radical and abrupt societal change. With every shooting, US institutions of learning are responding, and the implications are profound. A new security industry is booming, while the experience of coming of age in the USA is radically changing. Hardly anyone is taking real notice, or putting up any visible protest. If we continue a process of shock -> heightened security, without stepping back and examining how this accelerated culture-shift is reshaping us, we are going to lose our grip on open, freedom-cherishing society, all for the price of assuaging exaggerated risks and fears. A feedback loop can easily ensue, where every shock, and every downturn is popularly responded to with the welcoming of "enhanced" security, and the submission to incrementally smaller and smaller apportionment of personal privacy and freedom. This is not a conspiracy. This is a spontaneous sociopolitical virus that has overrun many other societies before, and that has invariably resulted in tyranny and social breakdown. In our case, the virus has mutated into something even better concealed behind seemingly benign and rapidly metastasizing private and state security institutions. The shocks that ushered in the Soviet security state were World War 2, and then direct shock tactics applied by government policy upon the population. In our new mutation of the virus, the shocks are isolated perceptually from the government: Shooters; terrorists; illegal aliens. Our defenses are compromised in the USA. We suffer from a deep-seated popular exceptionalist hubris, reassuring us that tyranny is what happens in the rest of the world, where people suffer the flaws the we don't share, of (fill in the blank with Liberalism, godlessness, backwardness etc.)__________________. If you're a USAmerican who is not concerned about the trend I'm describing; if you don't believe it's happening, and you think I'm exaggerating the danger to freedom, I certainly don't want to be like you- but somehow I still envy you. If you see things similarly as I do, and you cherish freedom, then let's start putting our heads together, because we're going to find ourselves in the middle of one hell of a fight soon. It's not too late to fight, and it's not too late to figure out how to fight, before we find ourselves behind a gilded iron curtain.
It is already to late. The Congress has given illegal immigrants many decades to infiltrate the US without ever trying to put a stop to them. They allowed that to get cheaper labor here and do away with the middle class. If you look around you'll see very few middle class people with salaries above 75,000.00 US today. That's what a real middle class person needs to be middle class due to inflation and devaluation of the dollar. With millions of immigrants who will work for cheap because they are illegal who needs a middle class? Most manufacturing jobs have long since been shipped to China or Mexico which again leads to fewer middle class citizens. The end is here.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
cosmictraveler: "It is already to late. The Congress has given illegal immigrants many decades to infiltrate the US without ever trying to put a stop to them." US borders have always been porous- for centuries, not decades. If we really want to suddenly seal them up like the Soviets did, we must understand that it will require the conversion of our society to closely resemble every visible and covert aspect of the Soviet model of state security. Earlier in our history, we had immigrants who worked without wage (slaves). We overcame much of that travesty, without suffering any subversion or security threat by those we exploited- probably because the tactics of contemporaty assymetrical warfare and violent resistance had yet to be popularized and embraced in desperation. Our greatest early public works in the USA were built using harshly-exploited foreign labor. But our nation was not subverted and taken over by African, Chinese, or Irish, or Italian, or Mexican, or any exploited ethnic wave of subsistence workers. Reform (which never comes easy) and not quick-fix walls and crackdowns, have headed off social upheaval in the USA. Today, our agriculture and many other industries run on cheap self-importing labor from the South, and it continues through domestic popular demand. We want cheap produce, and that means providing millions of workers far less in wages and benefits than legal laborers will tolerate. When US citizens -not politicians- decide to pay a fair wage for labor, illegal immigration will immediately decline, and the US labor pool will immediately become more legitimate. Entirely adequate labor laws are already in place to curtail and prevent illegal immigration- but US citizens are choosing not to follow, and not to enforce our existing labor laws. The construction of the Great Wall and the militarization of our borders is an avoidance of our neglected domestic enforcement of labor standards, and is a deceptive and hypocritical distraction from this reality. Poor migrant workers are not a threat to our security: Exploitation of the world's poor by USAmerican citizens presents serious threats to the USA, especially if we hide from the issues by hardening our society into a security-obsessed dystopia. Walling ourselves in is not a solution to any such problems. A fortress state will intensify our foreign-relations problems, isolating us from a world that is undergoing accelerating integrated development.
I ran accross a website from the UK that features pictures of destroyed speed trap cameras. I think that's the spirit. Cameras can't defend themselves.
spider that reminds me of a camera here (redlight camera so its fixed there all the time), this moron walked up to it and hit it with a baseball bat because he was caught going through a redlight. The camera had an automatic on when its damged so it took his photo. The guy drove off to get a gun, came back and shot it but didnt destroy the film so he got caughtPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It was so Funny because he is now in jail where he would have just recived a fine if he hadnt atacked the cameraPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
LOL, men are dumb. yeah, I went there! Aren't they setting up camera along the US/MX border and having them show 24/7 over the internet so people can watch it and report illegals coming over?
(sigh) I guess idoit resistance is better than none at all... Interesting article in The Nation about Campus Security culture: Repress U SOS: Students for an Orwellian Society
I have NO sympathy for those who drink and drive, speed or drive through red lights. If your going to kill yourselves do it where your not going to hurt someone else
