Originally posted by shaolin_Z
I don't expect [insert arbitrary percentage here] people to draw any conclusions no matter how bad things get...
Warrantless searches and seizures... check
Spying on civilians... check
Ability to strip citizenship... check
Ability to declare anyone an enemy combatant by the President or Secretary of defense... check
Habeus Corpus nullified... check
Indefinitie detainment... check
Torture... including your children... check
Wars based on lies... check
Haliburton Concentration Camps... check
Check points... check
and how does this relate to the police use of tasers in the videos provided?
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by shaolin_Z
Neigther, unless some stupid cop has a desrie to be be permanently crippled.
well your pride and ego is one thing, but thats exactly the kind of mentality a cop would take into consideration on whether or not he should pull the trigger again...whether that trigger be attached to a tazer gun, a pepper gun or one that goes bang.
anyway i hope you get my original point that tazing, no matter how brutal it may look like to witness, only lasts as long as the person being tazed refuses to cooperate. the second he/she begins to cooperate the pain is over.
pepper on the other hand will feel like his face is melting off two hours later as he sits in a cell and reminices about how much of a jackass he was acting like to be put there.
maybe i should have asked you, which do you think is more cruel?
shaolin_Z
quote:
Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
and how does this relate to the police use of tasers in the videos provided?
When both hemispheres of your brain are functioning in balance as a binary singularity... it's kind of hard to miss. Isolating your cognative functions to stricly one can not only lead to a severe imbalance with undesirable results, but, also distort the functionality and results from dichotomous isolation.
EDIT: You really can't see a clear abuse of power / 'authority' reflecting in every facet of institutional and social structures? Not to mention a gradual shift that is almost completely unlikely to regress?
shaolin_Z
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
well your pride and ego is one thing, but thats exactly the kind of mentality a cop would take into consideration on whether or not he should pull the trigger again...whether that trigger be attached to a tazer gun, a pepper gun or one that goes bang.
anyway i hope you get my original point that tazing, no matter how brutal it may look like to witness, only lasts as long as the person being tazed refuses to cooperate. the second he/she begins to cooperate the pain is over.
pepper on the other hand will feel like his face is melting off two hours later as he sits in a cell and reminices about how much of a jackass he was acting like to be put there.
maybe i should have asked you, which do you think is more cruel?
Well, like I said... there should be a good reason to resort to high voltage electrical shocks. And I tend to agree with you... pepper spray is potentially worse. But tasers are used rather generously and unecessarily by balless pigs on a power trip. If you've seen cops get tasered in controled conditions, they never do for more than 2 - 3 second, and a single stun only... whereas their civil victims are shot multiple times for extended periods of time. When one can't respect proper usage, like a child, they should [edit] NOT [/edit] be in possesion of it. It's not a freakin toy, and civilians they're supposed to be serving are not ing punching bags.
pkcRAISTLIN
quote:
Originally posted by shaolin_Z
When both hemispheres of your brain are functioning in balance as a binary singularity... it's kind of hard to miss. Isolating your cognative functions to stricly one can not only lead to a severe imbalance with undesirable results, but, also distort the functionality and results from dichotomous isolation.
yeah man, whatever.
quote:
Originally posted by shaolin_Z
EDIT: You really can't see a clear abuse of power / 'authority' reflecting in every facet of institutional and social structures? Not to mention a gradual shift that is almost completely unlikely to regress?
i think the manner in which you approach these questions is so biased and one-sided that you always come up with the same answer.
shaolin_Z
quote:
Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
yeah man, whatever.
:) You have much to learn...
quote:
Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
i think the manner in which you approach these questions is so biased and one-sided that you always come up with the same answer.
Justice is blind... moral relativism is... more often than not... complete hypocrisy.
pkcRAISTLIN
you still haven't connected the bush admin's draconian measures in law with that of the police use of tasers in a manner with which you find disagreement.
you also didn't provide a proper answer to q5 re capsicum spray versus tasering.
shaolin_Z
quote:
Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
you still haven't connected the bush admin's draconian measures in law with that of the police use of tasers in a manner with which you find disagreement.
I never made any specific connection between the two but instead hinted a reference to a framework they fit in... which you fail to see apparently. Circular arguments don't exactly do you a whole lot of good, other than demonstrate turning a blind eye to something you choose not to see. The number of pointer and indicators to any phenomenon is irrelevant given that position. Could you care to demonstrate how momentum is not definitively shifting to authoritarianism... or away from it... or even how status quo remains in some kind of constant stable equilibrium? If you're making a proposition against the highly plausible direction recent events have been continiously pushing us towards, you're going to do more than just attempt to deconstruct an advesarial position... and actually support yours, which is virtually non-existant... and weak at best.
quote:
Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
you also didn't provide a proper answer to q5 re capsicum spray versus tasering.
I actually did, you apparently lack comprehension skills in this regard. The assumptions of the framework the question relies on is "invalid," or highly questionable to say the least... but I don't expect you to see a problem with that.
EDIT: Failing to do neigther doesn't really leave you with much of an argument. Till then, we're just going in circles with you not being capable of standing your ground.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
capsicum spray
thats the word i was looking for!
MisterOpus1
While I agree with you on most instances, I'm going to have to disagree with you on a couple of others. Unfortunately I don't have the time I once did to research things to support myself better, so I'll have to resort to personal, anecdotal instances instead. So take them with a grain of salt.
quote:
Originally posted by shaolin_Z
I don't expect [insert arbitrary percentage here] people to draw any conclusions no matter how bad things get...
[QUOTE]Warrantless searches and seizures... check
For the most part, I agree (with you).
quote:
Spying on civilians... check
Very much agree.
quote:
Ability to strip citizenship... check
Don't know much about this one.
quote:
Ability to declare anyone an enemy combatant by the President or Secretary of defense... check
Very much agree.
quote:
Habeus Corpus nullified... check
Agree again
quote:
Indefinitie detainment... check
Agree.
quote:
Torture... including your children... check
Agree (what a ing mess we've created with this one especially).
Are you referring to police check points or military check points? I'm not a major fan of either myself, but I'll support anything that helps getting a drunk driver off the ing road before they cause harm to someone else.
On a personal note, almost 5 years ago a check point was supposed to go up on a road in my town but was called off because a major fire broke out in an apartment building. That check point that would have gone up would have stopped the ing drunk driving little 19 year old bitch that nailed my wife right in front of me as I was following her home from watching our friend play at a coffee shop. The girl had ran her stop sign and crossed the intersection where my wife's car was in the middle of, and subsequently my wife got T-boned and had her pelvis literally shattered. And I saw the whole thing in my car behind her. Two surgeries involving a metal plate and 19 screws, $95,000 in bills, 3 months of physical therapy later, she recovered well and has been doing terrific since.
But I guess I don't mind the drinking and driving check points as much anymore. In the grand scheme of things that cops could or should be doing in order to "protect and serve" us, a cop stopping cars at a check point in a college town where I'd guess probably 1 out of 4-5 cars has a drunk driver on Thurs.-Sat. nights doesn't really get my panties bunched up as much as it used to.
In regards to tasing, I have a couple of policemen as patients that I'm working with for various problems (one has epicondylitis in his elbow, the other has a torn hamstring from running after a perp). We've discussed the tasers at length, and the conclusion I've drawn so far is that neither one of them really like them much at all. In fact one of them says he can pretty much do the things he needs to without using it. However, he understands that there are instances to which they are vital to protection. And unfortunately, from the many hundreds to thousands of instances to which they've been used for in a positive manner for protection, the instances that are thrown out to the public in the news and on YouTube are the exceptionally few instances of abuse. And some of those instances of supposed abuse are even a matter of interpretation to which have been thrown out of court. So for me personally, I haven't seen enough evidence to say we should get rid of them altogether, at least not yet.
As for your list here, as pkcRAISTLIN had mentioned you seemed to be attempting to connect what this Administration has created with it's foreign and military policies versus the domestic judiciary branch that entails the attempts of the local police to uphold the law by protecting the citizens from lawbreakers. I understand your reply (somewhat) about a frame of reference to which both instances you describe fit in, however doing so creates a bit of an illusionary connection between the two, IMO. What is occurring in one particular branch of the government does not equate to ALL the remaining branches of government are under the same occurrence of events.
If you were not trying to make that connection, that's fine despite it appearing that way. If you were more or less making a larger point about authoritarianism without trying to make that connection, that's fine. If, however, you were attempting to make a connection, I'm afraid you'll have to be a bit more convincing, at least to me.
I don't know exactly what to think about authoritarianism as a whole. I think on the grand scheme of things what our country has personally compared to most is pretty good, but things have definitely changed over the past 7-8 years thanks in large part to this Administration's philosophy (Yoo doctrine, neoconservatism, Cheney's influence, etc.). Shades of gray tend to add up over time, but layer those shades on slowly, one by one and it becomes difficult to determine just how much different things have changed in the short term at all. Then you have to add in our society's supposed "watch dog" branch, the media, who's been horribly complicit with so much of the propaganda:
and you've really got to question just how far we've come. In our minds, at least in my mind we've unfortunately gone down the slippery slope way too far, and the backdrop of terrorists coming to take away our "freedom and liberties" has unfortunately enabled this to happen that much more easier. The irony that we are slowly doing to ourselves what we supposedly feared that the terrorists would be doing to us cannot be missed, which of course rightly puts into question who exactly is behind giving us this fear of all things surrounding us in the first place. Are we as bad off as many other places in the world? Hardly. But since we are supposedly a leader of the free world, I would not want any country to emulate our actions as a leader that we have taken over the last 7 years like the ones you've mentioned in that list of grievances above.
