‘They Shot at Little Kids, Too’

Who, some gang-bangers? Sort of, it was the Anaheim Police department responding to residents protesting the decision to gun down one of their unarmed neighbors. As you’ll note in the video, they not only fired rubber bullets into the crowd of women and children, they unleashed an attack dog which overturned a stroller and latched onto the heroic man protecting the baby inside.

The reason we know about this is because of the many bystanders who stood and filmed this outrageous exercise in police brutality, and who refused to sell their footage to the cops trying to buy the evidence. The pen is mightier than the sword, but the camera is mightier than the pen.

So Where Are the Women’s Rights Groups?

William Grigg reports on the third (that we know of) incident of a police officer attacking a pregnant woman. In every case the women were non-violent, and in at least two of the attacks the women were approaching full term; eight months in one, nine months in the other.

One wonders where organizations such as the National Organization for Women and the National Advisory Council on Violence Against Women are when these incidents occur. Where is Nancy Grace and why isn’t she going ballistic?

I Can’t Believe I Agree With This Guy

Charles Krauthammer:

“I don’t want regulations, I don’t want restrictions, I want a ban on this. Drones are instruments of war.”

“I don’t want to see it hovering over anybody’s home. Yes, you can say we have satellites, we’ve got Google Street View and London has a camera on every street corner but that’s not an excuse to cave in on everything else and accept a society where you’re always under — being watched by the government.”

I never thought I’d say this, but I agree with Krauthammer. (Though I disagree that these death machines should even be used in places like Somalia or Pakistan, mainly for this reason).

A True Defintion of ‘Cultural Suicide’

During this morning’s commute, conservative talk show host Greg Knapp was discussing radical Islam following the State Department’s latest declaration that the War on Terror has come to a close. He questioned the wisdom in ending the War on Terror in light of such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood gaining political traction in Egypt.

One of Knapp’s points was that, given the sentiments of certain Muslims the US should continue fighting terrorism. The host then went on to list some poll results, which showed that 26 percent of American Muslims, and half of Muslims worldwide, supported suicide attacks. A clip of Rep. Allen West was played, during which the congressman suggested that appeasement of Muslims would lead to “cultural suicide,” which Knapp agreed with.

Of course context is everything, and the polling of Muslims shouldn’t be isolated from the polling of other Americans. For instance, 60% of Americans were in favor of the Iraq war. After it started, 75% of Americans approved of how President Bush “handl[ed] the situation in Iraq,” and 70% thought the costs outweighed the benefits. So it’s not as if Muslims are the only group which advocates death and destruction.

The most important detail left out of Knapp’s analysis is why Muslims might support suicide bombing. This is a question few ever consider, and even fewer look to answer, but as I mentioned, it’s the most important one. Why would someone deliberately use suicide as a means of fighting?

Most chalk it up to Muslims being promised a life in paradise as martyrs. But that doesn’t explain why other groups use suicide as well. Robert Pape, of the University of Chicago has compiled a database of virtually all suicide attacks since 1980, as well as written a book on the subject, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

In his book, he notes that throughout history suicide has been used by Japanese Kamikazes, Islamic rebels in Chechnya, and the secular and atheist Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. So rather than the Muslim religion being the chief motivator, what Professor Pape found in his research is that repelling invaders served as the primary means to drive individuals to kill themselves. Indeed, it was driving out democratically elected governments specifically, that lead more than 300 people in the last thirty years to take their own lives.

Just in the last two weeks we heard from one of those American Muslims who ostensibly supports suicide terrorism. Tarek Mehanna, an American Muslim who was recently sentenced to 17 years for aiding terrorists, explained exactly how and why he became sympathetic to Muslims overseas. His conclusion after studying the situation was that Muslims have been the victims of terrorism themselves, and when they’ve retaliated, the cycle starts all over again, with Muslims being labeled as the terrorists.

Rep. Allen West is entirely wrong about what constitutes cultural suicide. It is not appeasing terrorists; cultural suicide is failing to realize what leads to terrorism and continuing to exacerbate the problem by killing innocent people. Not only does the US government invite further retaliation, but society in general becomes less and less inclined to reject warfare and violence. Once violence becomes acceptable overseas it’s only a matter of time before it becomes acceptable here at home.

We’re starting to see this now, with the militarization of domestic police forces, many of whom more closely resemble commandos than peace officers. It’s becoming less common to see the standard blue uniforms and simple tool belt worn by policemen for decades. Now we’re seeing the policeman’s uniform shift to black or charcoal, with body armor worn on the outside, and covered with equipment.

It’s as if the officer isn’t pulling traffic duty, but is instead setting out to raid fortified positions in a hostile neighborhood. They now carry a pistol and a tazer, many with special leg harnesses that allow more weapons and ammunition. When someone tried to rob a business in Mission, KS last year, several of the officers who responded brought M-4 carbines of the type used by SWAT and the military.

This is overkill. It serves no purpose, except to intimidate people and condition them to seeing larger caliber weapons and a more aggressive police presence in their lives. It will allow governments at all levels to one day perpetrate the same violence here that the state levies against “terrorists” overseas. Because people don’t see this militarism as anything to be afraid of, and because they’ve been taught to be servile, the situation will continue to deteriorate.

It need not go this way, however. If people will look at what is happening and recognize the move away from liberty for what it is – a large-scale decivilization of society, this trend could reverse. We don’t need an authoritarian police force to protect us from criminals, especially if that agency is equally ruthless and capable of dolling out the kind of violence they’re expected to defend us from.

The Space Between

Using a recent debate sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) as a spring board, Tim Hartnett tackled the question of “What is the Conservative Movement?” in a piece for the Mises Institute. The debate, between Reason’s Matt Welch and National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg, centered on whether “libertarians [are] part of the conservative movement?”

Hartnett posits that: “A simple way to demonstrate the chasm that separates libertarians from ‘conservatives’ of the 21st century is to use news incidents and media images as Rorschach inkblots and consider how differently each would respond.” He goes on to list several news items from recent history to show how wide indeed the “chasm” is between “Dittoheads” and libertarians.

The first image he uses is of a generic reality TV show depicting police officers in their daily activities. There are many such shows, and Hartnett is correct when he writes: “When a libertarian witnesses an emaciated destitute, confronted, seized, and roughly rifled by the constabulary under dubious pretenses on ‘reality’ TV, he is not immediately elated.”

He continues:

We are offended by the image of a man abject — on the ground and in the clutches of enormous, armored, and heavily armed men — without substantive evidence that he has harmed someone else. That these same public servants can bust into people’s homes, terrorize their children, kill their pets, shackle their persons, and destroy personal property on the flimsiest of pretexts is repellent to anyone placing even a modest value on the word liberty.

For an idea of just how far into the clutches of tyranny we have slipped, one need only browse the many “reality” TV shows glorifying the police state. “COPS” was first, but in the decades since its debut one can now watch a host of shows, including “Lockup,” “Cook County Jail,” “Wardens,” “Border Wars,” and “SWAT.”

While at times actual criminal suspects are booked in the jail shows, many are brought in for non-crime crimes such as drug possession or prostitution. Wardens is, of course a show about game wardens, who patrol (mostly) “public” lands looking to bust anyone who hasn’t paid to hunt on the King’s land. Not too long ago someone who hunted the King’s dear was considered a hero; not anymore. “Border Wars” is mostly video evidence of how futile the drug war is, and how inhumane the fed’s immigration policy is. And finally, “SWAT” chronicles the daily violence doled out to the populace in support of the drug war. There are times where violent offenders are targeted, but those instances, like the many jailhouse shows, are few and far between. The audience is mostly treated to clips of over-paid, trigger-happy storm-troopers of the sort Thomas Jefferson railed against in the Declaration of Independence.

But on the other hand, conservatives have no apparent disdain for such displays of state violence. As I noted last fall, they practically cheered as police at UC Davis showered non-violent protestors with harsh chemical agents.

From here the author discusses the career of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who claims, as a sniper in Iraq, to have killed more than 250 people. I once heard a radio interview with Kyle where he boasted of his killing, and the host, Greg Knapp, who claims to be a Christian, hailed him as a hero. (That Christians ought only to have one hero, and that only soldiers in God’s army should earn their admiration is sadly lost on many Evangelicals). Knapp went on to ask if he’s experienced emotional problems or has any regrets from his “profession,” and Kyle’s response was no. His only regret was that he hadn’t taken even more lives.

That the war he helped wage was not defensive in nature at all means that he was the aggressor in the situation. He is said to have killed a woman attempting to throw a hand grenade at an invading army. How is that noble? Where is the heroism in that act?

It’s precisely this distinction between defensive and offensive action that is lost on conservatives who, as Hartnett shows, know only to reflexively defend the military and its adventures. On the prevailing conservative attitude he writes that: “Not only may we invade nations that never attacked us, but now anyone defending his homeland risks becoming the subject of the sadistic whims of federal agents.”

Hartnett finishes with an indictment of the conservative news media which serves to perpetuate the conservative ethos of state-worship.

Much of today’s professional television ‘news’ revolves around name calling, subjective characterization, innuendo, one-upmanship, distorted context, and other gimmicks that get no one any closer to the truth or to valid conclusions. Dissenters are shut down with the ‘conspiracy-theory’ bludgeon by the very people finding plots against their vague ideals lurking in every shadow. Cable news continues to strive for the dignity of pro wrestling, even if Bill O’Reilly has learned to stop telling his guests to ‘shut up.’

The so-called conservative movement, unmoored by any true desire for limited government, can only evolve into a party of national mythos. Lacking any lodestar, it must eventually return to the fold of elite institutions that have repeatedly failed in their duties. Any idea of US ‘exceptionalism’ that isn’t rooted in limited government is a deranged political voodoo.

Indeed, because the government school system has neglected to provide even rudimentary education in analytic and basic reason, the populace (from Left and Right) is content to ingest all that is fed to them by the media, without so much as an ounce of critical thinking. Worse still, those who diligently tune into talk radio and nightly cable opinion shows believe they are informed and enlightened, when just the opposite is true.

A reader commented on Hartnett’s piece, writing that “This kind of needlessly obnoxious piece is precisely why libertarians get nowhere as a movement. Making fun of people who are ideologically similar for being insufficiently intelligent is self defeating….” But of course the piece is meant to demonstrate just how dissimilar the two ideologies are.

The chief difference between the two is not in their rhetoric, which in many areas is hard to distinguish, but in their actions. Conservatives often promote the virtues of free enterprise and individual liberty, but so often when the chips are down, side with the state. And that is why libertarians are not part of the conservative movement.