If you're still reading, you're a DFH. Respectable people who try to change policy aren't called activists, they're called lobbyists and donors.
Are you wearing a suit? Doesn't matter. Have you been working peacefully and professionally towards your goals? So what. Are you a law-abiding citizen who's trying to engage in a participatory democratic process with people who are making decisions about your future? Big whoop. Did you cut your hair, put on a tie, get a job? Sucker.
The governments of the world and the United Nations would like you to know that if you're too sympathetic with the oppressed, care about democracy, and value people more than money, you can go ahead and do absolutely everything right like we told you that you had ought to do.
And we will still punch you in the face.
You're welcome,
Your Overlords
Photo credit and note: Kris Krüg on Flickr. See the red stripe near the man's suit collar? Other photos clearly show it's a UNFCCC delegate's lanyard, which means the man holding up his hand in self-defense and getting punched in the face by police had to pass the registration security checks, register at the Bella Center convention hall in person and to have been issued a valid COP15 badge.
Witnesses have reported that the man had been inside the convention at least most of the previous week, and there had not been any reported security incidents caused by alarming attendee behavior at Bella Center before the NGO lock out. We were all, apparently, just a bit too unsightly to have around when actual heads of state came to Denmark to do our business.
Neither the MPs at Abu Ghraib nor the guards at Guantanamo Bay started the US down a path of being a nation that tortures all by their lonesome. They didn't even order it. And why should it be so surprising that there would be little squeamishness about torturing foreigners when our domestic culture has been encouraging in-house torture for a very long time?
The torture of US citizens is common in prisons. This includes dehumanizing solitary confinement and the threat of rape torture. Prisoner advocates have been pointing out for a very long time that prison rape is a casual punchline praised for universally accepted, though never proven, deterrence benefits. US prisoners of war considered solitary confinement among the most terrible tortures and nearly everyone considers rape to be torture, but we allow these things to be done in our country every day.
Though winking at torture never stopped with convicted inmates. Police brutality against minorities and uppity demonstrators has been a long-accepted staple of US national culture - almost as if getting to bully and beat people was a perk of being a law enforcement professional, because it's just so darn fun. Even if most members of the police force conduct themselves laudably and would never want to torment anyone, cases of sadistic behavior by law enforcement rarely raises the mainstream outrage meter, or any attention at all.
Now that Tasers have been approved for law enforcement use, police torture of even upstanding white people who've never protested anything in their lives has become commonplace. Which is great in a way, because then we're more sure to get news coverage of it. Still, it's disconcerting to realize how easy it was to sell everyone on the idea that the police should be able to torture whoever they feel like torturing whenever they want to.
Admittedly, Tasers don't usually cause major organ damage or death, so that's all right then. Except that technology advances are likely to begin making it so easy and efficient for the police to torture even large groups all at once that we might want to think harder about where this is going. Especially when the attitude of some people towards their fellow citizens has gotten so pitiless that moronic advertising company Saatchi & Saatchi of Los Angeles decided that terrorizing and threatening people would make for a good ad campaign, as did Toyota and a bunch of people who referred their 'friends' for this treatment.
Three weeks ago at a Baptism party in Virginia, Prince William County police tasered the grandfather of the boy being Baptized. Here is a local news report on the incident:
The grandfather was tased multiple times for the crime of being drunk on private property while trying to show his I.D. Tasering has become routine. Cop thinks you're being mouthy: you're tased. If the charges are later dropped, which they often are, the tasing was your punishment for the crime of not being deferential enough. An internal investigation concluded procedures were followed.
A New York mom was tasered in front of her kids because she questioned why she was being ticketed for driving with a cell phone when she didn't have one. She filed suit this week. Take a look at the video:
In this case our "heroic and manly" officer, embarrassed at his own mistake, tries to save face by tasering the mom in front of her crying kids. All charges against her have been dismissed and police are conducting an internal investigation to see if they can find a way to justify what happened.
In Michigan, two teenage boys died this spring in separate incidents. These and many other cases are detailed inside.
What happens when you combine a Democratic fundraiser in North San Diego County, a homophobic right-wing neighbor disturbing the peace, and the San Diego County Sheriffs? Apparently, one BIG, nasty mess! Here's the original TPM story:
The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that a fundraiser for Francine Busby, who previously ran for the deeply-Republican Fiftieth District and came close to winning in the 2006 special election and subsequent regular election, was raided by sheriffs after an unnamed neighbor made a noise complaint. Busby now calls it a "phony" noise complaint, and the article says that multiple neighbors said there was no great noise at all.
Here's the twist: The fundraiser was hosted by a lesbian couple, and shortly before the sheriffs came a particular neighbor had shouted anti-gay slurs at the assembled crowd. "It was a quiet home reception, disrupted by a vulgar person shouting obscenities from behind the bushes," Busby says.
As one neighbor told the paper: "We didn't hear anything until the sheriff came, with eight patrol cars and a helicopter."
And yes, the new developments are becoming more sordid by the minute. Details after the flip...
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