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Is this really the America that America wants? The article mentions one case where a judge refused to issue a search warrant for a narcotics investigation and

by Ovid 13y ago

Is this really the America that America wants? The article mentions one case where a judge refused to issue a search warrant for a narcotics investigation and instead the police brought representatives from the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and raided the place with a swat team to conduct an alcohol inspection. What did they find? Two sample bottles of beer that weren't labeled as samples and a bottle of vodka in the office. The fourth circuit court of appeals upheld the search. According to the article: So for now, in the Fourth Circuit, sending a SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

akiselev 13y ago
Americans vote for those who are tough on crime. I think CATO estimated (on the high end) about 40,000 SWAT/paramilitary raids a year and the public perception is that the targets are all criminals. To them this is just "acceptable collateral damage."
- mtgx 13y ago
  The problem is the public thinks that those being targeted are all dirty evil criminals, and I also think America as a whole doesn't have an "innocent before guilty" mentality. It's not just the American leaders that have corrupt minds. It's also a lot of Americans, who are supporting this sort of stuff. The media is also not helping at all, and making the problem worse, because they are usually on the government's side when it comes to such issues.
  - jbooth 13y ago
    The media's on sensationalism's side, and the mob's side.
  - stcredzero 13y ago
    The presumption of innocence is not directly enshrined in the constitution, and in the case of some crimes, like rape, has been deliberately and explicitly weakened.
    - Steuard 13y ago
      This is a bit off topic for this thread but given that you brought it up: It is hard for me to look at, say, Steubenville[1] (to take just the most publicized of several examples that I've seen in the news lately) and understand how anyone can suggest that accused rapists aren't given a presumption of innocence in our society. The blame heaped on rape victims is often tremendous, even when everyone knows that it happened. (In the Steubenville case, there were widely shared photos documenting what happened to the young woman in question and at least one video of a guy at the same party laughing about what his friends had done to her, and most of the local community evidently still strongly sided with her rapists.) [1] http://sports.yahoo.com/news/highschool--steubenville-high-school-football-players-found-guilty-of-raping-16-year-old-girl-164129528.html http://sports.yahoo.com/news/highschool--steubenville-high-s...
      - betterunix 13y ago
        It is hard to look at this case and find any presumption of innocence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case
      - valleyer 13y ago
        Sample size: 1.
        stcredzero 13y ago
        There are dozens of examples in local jurisdictions, as well as lots of policies in private institutions. Unfortunately, someone as yet needs to talk about this who doesn't manage to come across as an angry male loser. AFAIK, this hasn't penetrated the popular consciousness yet.
      - GeneralMayhem 13y ago
        If you look at the community of Steubenville, yes. If you look at the wider picture of media coverage, quite the opposite. Reddit started the witch trial pretty much instantly, with some of the most upvoted comments being for life in prison or worse. Look at the backlash when CNN referred to the accused as boys with a formerly promising future whose lives were now ruined. God forbid you show an ounce of sympathy for accused rapists, because it's impossible to be sympathetic to the victim and not want anyone to go through the hell that the rest of their collective life is going to be.
  - rday 13y ago
    I had a very charged discussion with friends just the other night about this very idea. I argued that even if a defendant has the resources to get to a jury trial, the jury is prejudiced against the "criminal" from the start. It turned out, however, that each person in the room had either been wrongly accused of a crime or knew someone that had been railroaded by the system. They knew that the prosecution wasn't perfect. My sample size is 6 people, myself included, and we are all fairly educated. Regarding the media, everyone in the room agreed that the Nancy Graces of the world are actively harming our society...
    - mindcrime 13y ago
      FWIW, I was on a jury for the first and (so far) only time, about 2 years ago. It wasn't a big, flashy murder or rape case, just a guy being accused of breaking into a cop car and stealing a flashlight and a handheld radio. But, I found that the other jurors, by and large, took the "innocent until proven guilty" thing VERY seriously. I know that most of us thought he was "probably" guilty, but in the end, we actually acquitted him on all charges because we didn't believe the State had proven he was guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt". Granted it's just one anecdote about one jury on one case in North Carolina, but this jury was not prejudiced against the "criminal" from the start. And, if anything, by the end, most of us were biased against the State for being (or appearing to be) some combination of: incompetent (the investigator from the Sheriff's department), abusive / a plain dick ( the prosecutor), and/or dishonest (the cop who had his car broken into).
- runarb 13y ago
  Unfortunately this is more being dumb on crime. Just think about all the criminals they could have investigated insted of thus amatur rides. Her in Norway its can sometime take 10-20 minutes just to get thru to the police if you have an emergency at night. I hope the local SWAT time at least is out chasing real cals and real criminals instead of shutting security guards and raiding the local veterans clubs for some $5 dollar poker fee.
  - akiselev 13y ago
    There have been incidents like the Oaksterdam raid where the DEA took up all SWAT resources for a raid of a civillian, unarmed (and legal state-wise) marijuana cooperative. Meanwhile, there was a school shooting minutes away. [1] The reality is that crime is falling in the United States and has been for a while (Freakanomics has a decent piece about the relationship of crime and the availability of abortion, with a time lag in the former that showed a correlation with the latter) and I think this paramilitarization is an attempt to fill up budgets and give reasons so that they aren't reduced in the future. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/oakland-school-shooting-oaksterdam-university-and-occupy-san-francisco-morning-roundup/2012/04/03/gIQAvWyrsS_blog.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/oakland-sc...
    - jleader 13y ago
      There's debate about whether increased availability of abortion really accounts for the decline in crime; one alternative hypothesis is that reduced rates of childhood exposure to lead (mostly from leaded gasoline and the resultant exhaust) is at least as responsible.
      - sneak 13y ago
        I remember reading a fantastic article on that topic, have you got a link?
        gromy 13y ago
        http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/07/AR2007070701073.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07...
mikeash 13y ago
Sadly, yes, it is the America that America wants, as far as I can tell. I think this is where efforts to fight these problems fall down. They're almost all based on the assumption that the populace doesn't want this stuff to happen, but that the government pushes it through by abusing power, subverting democracy, etc. But from what I see, this is not the case. Most Americans want this. Whether it's gun-wielding maniacs, drug dealers, or international terrorist masterminds, they feel unsafe, and want the government to help. They like heavily-armed SWAT teams available at a moment's notice. They like the government spying on every communication they can get their hands on. They like x-ray machines and body scanners in airports. There is a sizable minority where sanity remains, but it is a minority. I think that efforts to fight these problems need to recognize this, and realize that you have to convince the people as your primary action. Fighting the government won't help, because the people will insist that these things be done, as long as the majority feels this way. No, I don't know how....
- stcredzero 13y ago
  > Sadly, yes, it is the America that America wants, as far as I can tell. Many young people coming out of school seem to have no conception of rights. To them, it's excusable for rights to be violated if they feel enough justified anger. They are unclear on the concept that rights apply to people and situations in ways they may not like.
  - falcolas 13y ago
    Well, they did just come out of schools where metal detectors and police patrolling the halls was the enforced norm. They rode to school in busses with cameras that watched their every move. How can we expect them to suddenly expect freedom, when they've never had it?
  - mikeash 13y ago
    Is this any surprise for people who grew up in a country where invading countries on false pretexts was seen as the right thing to do, where criticizing the government was seen as bad no matter what the reasons are, and where the threat of terrorism is somehow hyped up far beyond the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation in the Cold War? I saw this coming when the WTC rubble was still smoking. The government could have potentially worked to calm down the populace, but instead they amplified the fear. We've been paying the price ever since.
logn 13y ago
No, of course it's not the America we want. It's the America we get though due to our longstanding apathy and inability to curb special interest groups and corporate control of politics. I think things will change though. Things have been pretty nice in the US for a while. We're now seeing the dark side of apathy and people are starting to care again (in my opinion). It had been pretty easy to shrug off politics as corrupt and not care when we still had relative normalcy. But a lot of Americans have awoken in recent weeks to find themselves living in a sci-fi dystopia that we were warned about in the classics of literature, the kind that had always been eerily similar to our lives but never quite reached. We're now in full on 1984 and Americans won't accept that, I guarantee it (we're the country that ended slavery and celebrate our roots as rebels: we shall overcome).
- Ovid 13y ago
  I agree with much of what you say, but I'm not sure I agree that "Americans won't accept that". - Obama has a secret "kill list" and has bragged about killing Americans without due process of law. - We have widespread surveillance of our phones and email. - The FBI admits that drones are now being used for domestic surveillance. - The activist Supreme Court is continuing to gut our laws and give Big Business everything they want. - The TSA is groping and nude scanning everyone, they've never caught a single terrorist, but are expanding beyond airports. - Half of the inmates at Guantanamo have been cleared for release but are still detained a decade after incarceration. - Half of America is in poverty. - The Obama administration is trying to gut the Freedom of Information Act by denying certain doesn't even exist. - The Supreme Court and various politicians are finding more ways of restricting the right to vote. But people won't shut the fuck up about Kim and Kanye's baby. It's 1984 meets Brave New World.
  - jaekwon 13y ago
    - Internet regulation justified by copyright protection - Continued unconstitutional wars again "terrorism" - Continued imperialism - Whistleblower vilification - Implicit taxation through unbridled govt debt On Facebook, some friends are even afraid to "like" these stories now. Most friends just ignore my posts. I can't tell whether they're apathetic, or whether they're suppressing it in fear. Or whether Facebook is throttling my posts using their "spam" algorithm. Maybe I've been throttled by my friends. Most friends on Facebook post about how ugly or pretty something is, about the food they consume, or they're pushing some agenda of their own, as everybody has them nowadays. Then you start wondering whether you're just being paranoid. Of course in normal pre-media life, such an inconsistent state of existence would be impossible. Can you imagine everybody around you being happy with ice-cream cones after being abused by yet another "lawful" breach of your liberty by the SWAT team, joined by some "celebrity"? So it's easy to ignore the signs and live on earning your paycheck. Every day is exactly the same. You can't stay here, keep on moving on. Dude, how do you even watch sports right now? There's so much work to do. Yet days go on, everybody is chasing a paycheck or chasing a paper pyramid scheme. Or chasing fame, or chasing tail, anything to help take their minds off the now-ordinary horrid reality. Some see the problems and can't help but feel that something is wrong, that something is unjust in this world. They're searching for a real purpose, as they stumble with potential solutions that have been tried and have failed. While we ignore the children.
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
It
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
It
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
It's the America you paid for. Three trillion dollars on a decade of war does not just vanish, it does not stay abroad. Demobbed soldiers, private training and supply companies, attitudes and expectations - they have to go somewhere, do something, affect someone. You have the America you paid for.
- tsotha 13y ago
  This has nothing to do with war.
  - vacri 13y ago
    lifeisstillgood is talking about the cultural expectation that problems are solved by throwing overwhelming force at them.
    - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
      True. Fallujah, being an example of SWAT team over-reaction On a nationstate level. the more direct problem that there is no a preponderance of ex-soldiers, weapons, and an entire industrial base massively expanded and looking for civilian roles now everyone can see wars winding down and this kind of thing will be more prevalent. All the forces mentioned in the article (including "militarisation" are conspiring in a self-reinforcing system) It's hard to see how to move away ("what you think our boys in blue should not have body armour? APCs?")
      - tsotha 13y ago
        >True. Fallujah, being an example of SWAT team over-reaction On a nationstate level. That's so daft I don't know where to start. There's no such thing as an overreaction in war. >the more direct problem that there is no a preponderance of ex-soldiers, weapons, and an entire industrial base massively expanded and looking for civilian roles now everyone can see wars winding down and this kind of thing will be more prevalent. All these things were true to a much greater extent at the end of the Vietnam war and again at the end of the cold war.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Of course it isn't the America that America wants. But the problem is that most people are not aware of the connections between the incentives and the policies and actions those incentives produce. Indeed, most folks, harbor some bit of political ideology which is in some way counter-factual and they refuse to acknowledge that being the case. That applies to EVERYONE of EVERY political party. Period. What's worse is that now our public political discourse is so tainted and poisonous that it is nigh impossible to actually have a frank and honest discussion about any matter of public policy. It's almost all just games and shouting instead. There is hope, but it's going to take more hard work than most people believe to make things significantly better.
ajtaylor 13y ago
It's not the America I grew up in, nor the one I want to live in. So I left and have no plans to go back anytime soon. The land of the free isn't so free anymore, which makes me incredibly sad. And my parents live in VA!
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  well, the America has definitely changed during last decade+. Yet, still it is somewhat surprising that there is a place you found you think is more free.
  - ajtaylor 13y ago
    I now live very happily in Australia. It's not perfect by any means (nanny state comes to mind), but I feel safer here. More importantly, my wife feels safer.
    - dschobel 13y ago
      The issue was never one of safety, the odds were never high that you would be on the receiving end of one of these SWAT attacks. The issue is the rights of citizens and their protection from unwarranted searches and unreasonable uses of force. Australia has it's own issues on that front, look up Labor's recent proposal of data retention for electronic records or the infamous great firewall of Australia. And as far as government's with regulatory zeal go, you've hit the motherload. It's a lovely country (I've spent the last three years in Sydney and really and truly loved it) but don't kid yourself about the level of government intrusion in every. last. bloody. thing. It's maddening.
      - ajtaylor 13y ago
        The safety issue is not about the government but the level of violence in general society, schools, etc. IMHO, Australia as a whole is a safer place to live than the US right now. You don't hear about people shooting up schools, etc in Australia because it doesn't happen. It feels to me that the rate of this type of incident in the US is increasing. As I said, Australia isn't perfect by far. But at least the government isn't ignoring its core, founding principles like the US government has been doing the last couple decades. I did mention nanny state in my original comment. To each their own. :)
ctdonath 13y ago
So for now, in the Fourth Circuit, sending a SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Oh, it goes much, much farther than that. The US Supreme Court has ruled (see Raich) that the federal government is justified in sending an armed raid into a terminally ill old lady's home because she allegedly was growing six marijuana plants under her doctor's supervision & approval for her sole personal use in accordance with state law. The "justified" rationale? Her home-grown state-legal personal-use herbs decreased demand in illegal inter-state commerce, therefor affected inter-state commerce, therefor was subject to federal regulation. I kid you not. (Consequential tangent: if the court had not ruled that way, a pending related case (Stewart) would have permitted felons to home-build their own machine-guns. The court was faced with bizarre rulings whichever way they went with Raich.)
- gohrt 13y ago
  > if the court had not ruled that way, a pending related case (Stewart) would have permitted felons to home-build their own machine-guns This is false. The related case would have left machine-gun building a matter of State law. Pure-Federalism is not the only possible form of governance, and it's not the US Constitution's approved form.
  - ctdonath 13y ago
    Not false. There is currently a federal prohibition on anyone making machineguns at all (military contracts of course exempted); if Raich had been ruled to the contrary, it would have applied to Stewart in such a way as to remove machinegun construction from the federal prohibition IF the item in question remained entirely in-state, consequence going so far as to restrict the federal government from prohibiting felons from making them (as Mr. Stewart was, in fact, a felon convicted of making a novel home-brew machinegun). Thus, the federal government would have permitted felons to home-build their own machineguns. We were talking about federal laws and courts. I assume that in a short blog post I'm not expected to address the proliferation of overlapping jursidictional priorities and conflicts. But since you insist on taking the discussion where it wasn't going... Fact is, majority of US states do permit machinegun ownership, so long as it complies with federal law; thus if federal law permits felons building machineguns (so long as it remains in-state), majority of states would not prohibit it. Now that the discussion has clarified that the remaining prohibitions would occur in a minority of more than four dozen states, and that the federal government would have at least had no say in the matter (as opposed to compulsive legalization in all encompassed jurisdictions), and that the discussion had not been addressing state laws (or if it did, it was that the applicable state ALLOWED the activity), that for most practical purposes the one-sentence summary of the horribly verbose & convoluted verdict in question and its consequences was sufficiently accurate? (Pardon me. I'm getting increasingly irritated by exchanges that amount to: "X." "X? You're WRONG because you didn't address minor tangential issues Y, Z, P, D, and Q in comprehensive detail, all of which had little to do with the discussion at hand.")

by Ovid 13y ago

akiselev 13y ago

Americans vote for those who are tough on crime. I think CATO estimated (on the high end) about 40,000 SWAT/paramilitary raids a year and the public perception is that the targets are all criminals. To them this is just "acceptable collateral damage."

mtgx 13y ago
The problem is the public thinks that those being targeted are all dirty evil criminals, and I also think America as a whole doesn't have an "innocent before guilty" mentality. It's not just the American leaders that have corrupt minds. It's also a lot of Americans, who are supporting this sort of stuff. The media is also not helping at all, and making the problem worse, because they are usually on the government's side when it comes to such issues.
- jbooth 13y ago
  The media's on sensationalism's side, and the mob's side.
- stcredzero 13y ago
  The presumption of innocence is not directly enshrined in the constitution, and in the case of some crimes, like rape, has been deliberately and explicitly weakened.
  - Steuard 13y ago
    This is a bit off topic for this thread but given that you brought it up: It is hard for me to look at, say, Steubenville[1] (to take just the most publicized of several examples that I've seen in the news lately) and understand how anyone can suggest that accused rapists aren't given a presumption of innocence in our society. The blame heaped on rape victims is often tremendous, even when everyone knows that it happened. (In the Steubenville case, there were widely shared photos documenting what happened to the young woman in question and at least one video of a guy at the same party laughing about what his friends had done to her, and most of the local community evidently still strongly sided with her rapists.) [1] http://sports.yahoo.com/news/highschool--steubenville-high-school-football-players-found-guilty-of-raping-16-year-old-girl-164129528.html http://sports.yahoo.com/news/highschool--steubenville-high-s...
    - betterunix 13y ago
      It is hard to look at this case and find any presumption of innocence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case
    - valleyer 13y ago
      Sample size: 1.
      - stcredzero 13y ago
        There are dozens of examples in local jurisdictions, as well as lots of policies in private institutions. Unfortunately, someone as yet needs to talk about this who doesn't manage to come across as an angry male loser. AFAIK, this hasn't penetrated the popular consciousness yet.
    - GeneralMayhem 13y ago
      If you look at the community of Steubenville, yes. If you look at the wider picture of media coverage, quite the opposite. Reddit started the witch trial pretty much instantly, with some of the most upvoted comments being for life in prison or worse. Look at the backlash when CNN referred to the accused as boys with a formerly promising future whose lives were now ruined. God forbid you show an ounce of sympathy for accused rapists, because it's impossible to be sympathetic to the victim and not want anyone to go through the hell that the rest of their collective life is going to be.
- rday 13y ago
  I had a very charged discussion with friends just the other night about this very idea. I argued that even if a defendant has the resources to get to a jury trial, the jury is prejudiced against the "criminal" from the start. It turned out, however, that each person in the room had either been wrongly accused of a crime or knew someone that had been railroaded by the system. They knew that the prosecution wasn't perfect. My sample size is 6 people, myself included, and we are all fairly educated. Regarding the media, everyone in the room agreed that the Nancy Graces of the world are actively harming our society...
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    FWIW, I was on a jury for the first and (so far) only time, about 2 years ago. It wasn't a big, flashy murder or rape case, just a guy being accused of breaking into a cop car and stealing a flashlight and a handheld radio. But, I found that the other jurors, by and large, took the "innocent until proven guilty" thing VERY seriously. I know that most of us thought he was "probably" guilty, but in the end, we actually acquitted him on all charges because we didn't believe the State had proven he was guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt". Granted it's just one anecdote about one jury on one case in North Carolina, but this jury was not prejudiced against the "criminal" from the start. And, if anything, by the end, most of us were biased against the State for being (or appearing to be) some combination of: incompetent (the investigator from the Sheriff's department), abusive / a plain dick ( the prosecutor), and/or dishonest (the cop who had his car broken into).
runarb 13y ago
Unfortunately this is more being dumb on crime. Just think about all the criminals they could have investigated insted of thus amatur rides. Her in Norway its can sometime take 10-20 minutes just to get thru to the police if you have an emergency at night. I hope the local SWAT time at least is out chasing real cals and real criminals instead of shutting security guards and raiding the local veterans clubs for some $5 dollar poker fee.
- akiselev 13y ago
  There have been incidents like the Oaksterdam raid where the DEA took up all SWAT resources for a raid of a civillian, unarmed (and legal state-wise) marijuana cooperative. Meanwhile, there was a school shooting minutes away. [1] The reality is that crime is falling in the United States and has been for a while (Freakanomics has a decent piece about the relationship of crime and the availability of abortion, with a time lag in the former that showed a correlation with the latter) and I think this paramilitarization is an attempt to fill up budgets and give reasons so that they aren't reduced in the future. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/oakland-school-shooting-oaksterdam-university-and-occupy-san-francisco-morning-roundup/2012/04/03/gIQAvWyrsS_blog.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/oakland-sc...
  - jleader 13y ago
    There's debate about whether increased availability of abortion really accounts for the decline in crime; one alternative hypothesis is that reduced rates of childhood exposure to lead (mostly from leaded gasoline and the resultant exhaust) is at least as responsible.
    - sneak 13y ago
      I remember reading a fantastic article on that topic, have you got a link?
      - gromy 13y ago
        http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/07/AR2007070701073.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07...

mikeash 13y ago

Sadly, yes, it is the America that America wants, as far as I can tell. I think this is where efforts to fight these problems fall down. They're almost all based on the assumption that the populace doesn't want this stuff to happen, but that the government pushes it through by abusing power, subverting democracy, etc. But from what I see, this is not the case. Most Americans want this. Whether it's gun-wielding maniacs, drug dealers, or international terrorist masterminds, they feel unsafe, and want the government to help. They like heavily-armed SWAT teams available at a moment's notice. They like the government spying on every communication they can get their hands on. They like x-ray machines and body scanners in airports. There is a sizable minority where sanity remains, but it is a minority. I think that efforts to fight these problems need to recognize this, and realize that you have to convince the people as your primary action. Fighting the government won't help, because the people will insist that these things be done, as long as the majority feels this way. No, I don't know how....

stcredzero 13y ago
> Sadly, yes, it is the America that America wants, as far as I can tell. Many young people coming out of school seem to have no conception of rights. To them, it's excusable for rights to be violated if they feel enough justified anger. They are unclear on the concept that rights apply to people and situations in ways they may not like.
- falcolas 13y ago
  Well, they did just come out of schools where metal detectors and police patrolling the halls was the enforced norm. They rode to school in busses with cameras that watched their every move. How can we expect them to suddenly expect freedom, when they've never had it?
- mikeash 13y ago
  Is this any surprise for people who grew up in a country where invading countries on false pretexts was seen as the right thing to do, where criticizing the government was seen as bad no matter what the reasons are, and where the threat of terrorism is somehow hyped up far beyond the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation in the Cold War? I saw this coming when the WTC rubble was still smoking. The government could have potentially worked to calm down the populace, but instead they amplified the fear. We've been paying the price ever since.

logn 13y ago

No, of course it's not the America we want. It's the America we get though due to our longstanding apathy and inability to curb special interest groups and corporate control of politics. I think things will change though. Things have been pretty nice in the US for a while. We're now seeing the dark side of apathy and people are starting to care again (in my opinion). It had been pretty easy to shrug off politics as corrupt and not care when we still had relative normalcy. But a lot of Americans have awoken in recent weeks to find themselves living in a sci-fi dystopia that we were warned about in the classics of literature, the kind that had always been eerily similar to our lives but never quite reached. We're now in full on 1984 and Americans won't accept that, I guarantee it (we're the country that ended slavery and celebrate our roots as rebels: we shall overcome).

Ovid 13y ago
I agree with much of what you say, but I'm not sure I agree that "Americans won't accept that". - Obama has a secret "kill list" and has bragged about killing Americans without due process of law. - We have widespread surveillance of our phones and email. - The FBI admits that drones are now being used for domestic surveillance. - The activist Supreme Court is continuing to gut our laws and give Big Business everything they want. - The TSA is groping and nude scanning everyone, they've never caught a single terrorist, but are expanding beyond airports. - Half of the inmates at Guantanamo have been cleared for release but are still detained a decade after incarceration. - Half of America is in poverty. - The Obama administration is trying to gut the Freedom of Information Act by denying certain doesn't even exist. - The Supreme Court and various politicians are finding more ways of restricting the right to vote. But people won't shut the fuck up about Kim and Kanye's baby. It's 1984 meets Brave New World.
- jaekwon 13y ago
  - Internet regulation justified by copyright protection - Continued unconstitutional wars again "terrorism" - Continued imperialism - Whistleblower vilification - Implicit taxation through unbridled govt debt On Facebook, some friends are even afraid to "like" these stories now. Most friends just ignore my posts. I can't tell whether they're apathetic, or whether they're suppressing it in fear. Or whether Facebook is throttling my posts using their "spam" algorithm. Maybe I've been throttled by my friends. Most friends on Facebook post about how ugly or pretty something is, about the food they consume, or they're pushing some agenda of their own, as everybody has them nowadays. Then you start wondering whether you're just being paranoid. Of course in normal pre-media life, such an inconsistent state of existence would be impossible. Can you imagine everybody around you being happy with ice-cream cones after being abused by yet another "lawful" breach of your liberty by the SWAT team, joined by some "celebrity"? So it's easy to ignore the signs and live on earning your paycheck. Every day is exactly the same. You can't stay here, keep on moving on. Dude, how do you even watch sports right now? There's so much work to do. Yet days go on, everybody is chasing a paycheck or chasing a paper pyramid scheme. Or chasing fame, or chasing tail, anything to help take their minds off the now-ordinary horrid reality. Some see the problems and can't help but feel that something is wrong, that something is unjust in this world. They're searching for a real purpose, as they stumble with potential solutions that have been tried and have failed. While we ignore the children.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

It's the America you paid for. Three trillion dollars on a decade of war does not just vanish, it does not stay abroad. Demobbed soldiers, private training and supply companies, attitudes and expectations - they have to go somewhere, do something, affect someone. You have the America you paid for.

tsotha 13y ago
This has nothing to do with war.
- vacri 13y ago
  lifeisstillgood is talking about the cultural expectation that problems are solved by throwing overwhelming force at them.
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    True. Fallujah, being an example of SWAT team over-reaction On a nationstate level. the more direct problem that there is no a preponderance of ex-soldiers, weapons, and an entire industrial base massively expanded and looking for civilian roles now everyone can see wars winding down and this kind of thing will be more prevalent. All the forces mentioned in the article (including "militarisation" are conspiring in a self-reinforcing system) It's hard to see how to move away ("what you think our boys in blue should not have body armour? APCs?")
    - tsotha 13y ago
      >True. Fallujah, being an example of SWAT team over-reaction On a nationstate level. That's so daft I don't know where to start. There's no such thing as an overreaction in war. >the more direct problem that there is no a preponderance of ex-soldiers, weapons, and an entire industrial base massively expanded and looking for civilian roles now everyone can see wars winding down and this kind of thing will be more prevalent. All these things were true to a much greater extent at the end of the Vietnam war and again at the end of the cold war.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

Of course it isn't the America that America wants. But the problem is that most people are not aware of the connections between the incentives and the policies and actions those incentives produce. Indeed, most folks, harbor some bit of political ideology which is in some way counter-factual and they refuse to acknowledge that being the case. That applies to EVERYONE of EVERY political party. Period. What's worse is that now our public political discourse is so tainted and poisonous that it is nigh impossible to actually have a frank and honest discussion about any matter of public policy. It's almost all just games and shouting instead. There is hope, but it's going to take more hard work than most people believe to make things significantly better.

ajtaylor 13y ago

It's not the America I grew up in, nor the one I want to live in. So I left and have no plans to go back anytime soon. The land of the free isn't so free anymore, which makes me incredibly sad. And my parents live in VA!

VladRussian2 13y ago
well, the America has definitely changed during last decade+. Yet, still it is somewhat surprising that there is a place you found you think is more free.
- ajtaylor 13y ago
  I now live very happily in Australia. It's not perfect by any means (nanny state comes to mind), but I feel safer here. More importantly, my wife feels safer.
  - dschobel 13y ago
    The issue was never one of safety, the odds were never high that you would be on the receiving end of one of these SWAT attacks. The issue is the rights of citizens and their protection from unwarranted searches and unreasonable uses of force. Australia has it's own issues on that front, look up Labor's recent proposal of data retention for electronic records or the infamous great firewall of Australia. And as far as government's with regulatory zeal go, you've hit the motherload. It's a lovely country (I've spent the last three years in Sydney and really and truly loved it) but don't kid yourself about the level of government intrusion in every. last. bloody. thing. It's maddening.
    - ajtaylor 13y ago
      The safety issue is not about the government but the level of violence in general society, schools, etc. IMHO, Australia as a whole is a safer place to live than the US right now. You don't hear about people shooting up schools, etc in Australia because it doesn't happen. It feels to me that the rate of this type of incident in the US is increasing. As I said, Australia isn't perfect by far. But at least the government isn't ignoring its core, founding principles like the US government has been doing the last couple decades. I did mention nanny state in my original comment. To each their own. :)

ctdonath 13y ago

So for now, in the Fourth Circuit, sending a SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Oh, it goes much, much farther than that. The US Supreme Court has ruled (see Raich) that the federal government is justified in sending an armed raid into a terminally ill old lady's home because she allegedly was growing six marijuana plants under her doctor's supervision & approval for her sole personal use in accordance with state law. The "justified" rationale? Her home-grown state-legal personal-use herbs decreased demand in illegal inter-state commerce, therefor affected inter-state commerce, therefor was subject to federal regulation. I kid you not. (Consequential tangent: if the court had not ruled that way, a pending related case (Stewart) would have permitted felons to home-build their own machine-guns. The court was faced with bizarre rulings whichever way they went with Raich.)

gohrt 13y ago
> if the court had not ruled that way, a pending related case (Stewart) would have permitted felons to home-build their own machine-guns This is false. The related case would have left machine-gun building a matter of State law. Pure-Federalism is not the only possible form of governance, and it's not the US Constitution's approved form.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  Not false. There is currently a federal prohibition on anyone making machineguns at all (military contracts of course exempted); if Raich had been ruled to the contrary, it would have applied to Stewart in such a way as to remove machinegun construction from the federal prohibition IF the item in question remained entirely in-state, consequence going so far as to restrict the federal government from prohibiting felons from making them (as Mr. Stewart was, in fact, a felon convicted of making a novel home-brew machinegun). Thus, the federal government would have permitted felons to home-build their own machineguns. We were talking about federal laws and courts. I assume that in a short blog post I'm not expected to address the proliferation of overlapping jursidictional priorities and conflicts. But since you insist on taking the discussion where it wasn't going... Fact is, majority of US states do permit machinegun ownership, so long as it complies with federal law; thus if federal law permits felons building machineguns (so long as it remains in-state), majority of states would not prohibit it. Now that the discussion has clarified that the remaining prohibitions would occur in a minority of more than four dozen states, and that the federal government would have at least had no say in the matter (as opposed to compulsive legalization in all encompassed jurisdictions), and that the discussion had not been addressing state laws (or if it did, it was that the applicable state ALLOWED the activity), that for most practical purposes the one-sentence summary of the horribly verbose & convoluted verdict in question and its consequences was sufficiently accurate? (Pardon me. I'm getting increasingly irritated by exchanges that amount to: "X." "X? You're WRONG because you didn't address minor tangential issues Y, Z, P, D, and Q in comprehensive detail, all of which had little to do with the discussion at hand.")