“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked 1935. I've been doing a close reading of Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces, and I'm trying to unweave the major narrative threads that explain how … [Read more...] about Rise of the Warrior Cop – Review Part 3 of 5: Perverse Incentives
Rise of the Warrior Cop – Review Part 2 of 5: Justification and Permission
The public in the past have naively avoided consideration of the fact that the principle difference between a democracy and an totalitarian form of government is not so much in the laws under which they operate as it is in the manner by which the laws are applied.-- Don L. Kooken, Ethics in Police Service. 1957. In the Part 1 of my review of Radley Balko's book Rise of the … [Read more...] about Rise of the Warrior Cop – Review Part 2 of 5: Justification and Permission
Rise of the Warrior Cop – Review Part 1 of 5: History
Since its inception, the police establishment has conducted itself more as the agent of the power structure than the servant of a pluralistic society.-- Former FBI Special Agent William W. Turner. The Police Establishment. 1968. I've been waiting a long time for Radley Balko to write a book, and now he finally has. Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's … [Read more...] about Rise of the Warrior Cop – Review Part 1 of 5: History
Boys and Harlots Beware
Sid Davis was a producer of educational films for children in the 1950's and '60's. All the ones I've seen were painful to watch, but one of them managed to achieve infamy: Boys Beware (1961), which warns children and parents of the dangers presented by homosexuals.As you'd expect from that description, it's vile crap that conflates homosexuality with predatory pedophilia. … [Read more...] about Boys and Harlots Beware
So What Have We Learned?
I've moved on to the 9/12 world, but yesterday Charles Stross wrote: Twelve years ago today, a cell of angry, highly committed, and (by the standards of their peers) extremely well trained young men executed the simultaneous hijacking of four airliners, and used them to mount a suicide attack on those they perceived as their enemies.What have we learned from this? I … [Read more...] about So What Have We Learned?