Absolutely it does. No question. But what being a cop doesn’t do, at least not reliably and completely as you seem to think it does, is make you treat the general public as criminals in thier entirety.
You don’t put on the uniform to do a jackboot crackdown on everyone you come across. You put the uniform on to protect the general public from the maniacs, assholes, psychos and general unclassified bad guys that threaten their lives and/or property.
If you stop someone, however, what you don’t know is if they are any of the above until you start to talk to them, and then you still don’t know. That ‘arms length’ reaction you get from officers doing their jobs is essential to their safety. Sorry if you feel like a criminal when you’re stopped for speeding and there’s a bright light in your back window and I you’re told to put your hands where I can see them. Because what I don’t know when you’re pulled down for speeding is if you’re like This upstanding citizen or just some guy going home after a long day. I’m going to be polite, I’m going to be professional, and above all, I’m going to be safe and frankly I don’t give a tinkers damn about your feelings. Stay under the posted speed limit (in this case) and you and the police will never meet. If you take our exchange personally, sorry, but your feelings aren’t worth my life.
Kid, Kurt Cobain woul puke in his soup listening to you, if he hadn’t blown his brains out with the death machine.
I get it. You’re against the man! Down with the suburban soccer moms! Down with the civil servants! Down with down! Eh. You’re a one string man-banjo. I’ll bet you have a dozen Che Guevara T-shirts in different colors from urban outfitters too.
Listen. Ham-handed social and civil disobendience is fine when you’re 20 and have fuck-all to do, but those ‘poor people’ you’re fighting so hard to defend would leave your ass on the curb of their manicured suburban mcmansion if they so happened to hit the winning lottery numbers. This is the key, Chico. You don’t fight poverty like it’s something you can touch. Just like you don’t fight ‘terrorism’ like it’s a stock item at wal-mart. You’d have as much luck declaring a war on farts.
It’s better to realize your role as citizen who with other citizens can make a difference through the channels that were set up by and for the citizens.
Sure, you can make a stink, shout, wring your hands, beat a drum, vandalize things, but that will take you bloody well nowhere. In fact, it’s exactly what the powers that be HOPE people like you do. It’s an exercise in self-marginalization.
Someone who, like Henry Rollins has learned to moderate to the point where people will listen, because not only does he make sense, he does so clearly, cleverly and without actively damaging everyones’ property.
You seem like a smart guy, but you’re acting like an asshole.
You guys put your life on the line daily for us and I know the overwhelming majority of the populace appreciate that and are grateful for it. I know nothing about police work other that what I’ve seen on documentaries, etc but I have read the reports of cops being blown away when they pull someone over for a routine traffic stop. You have every right to be cautious until you can assess the situation properly.
Long may you and your colleagues continue to stay safe!
Drop, honey, this is the kind of idiot who thinks they are all about the “Country Joe and the Fish Cheer” but probably can’t even spell it. (Hint to Smash - it starts with, “Gimme an F!”) He’s not all about “the people” - he’s a moron with no grasp of reality. Don’t sweat it. We got better things to do. Like subjugating the people and shit and being mean and not knowing how we’re trodding on the - well - downtrodden and shit.
Good lord - I’m losing it, dropzone. I actually put TIME into answering this idiot. That ain’t LIKE me!
To quote Monty, No he doesn’t and I don’t think its an act. I kind of wish it was. There are enough crazy folks in the world right now.
But I do admit I find **StS **to be amusing in a way. His Bizarro logic and his stubborn view that he’s right and we’re all big meanes for not agreeing with him has given me many chuckles in the last few days.
I don’t find him amusing at all, unfortunately. I’ve known folks like him who:
-Co-opted a peaceful march to memorialize Bob Sheldon (in whose bookstore I volunteered), in order to turn it into exactly the sort of rah-rah-patriotic-bring-the-troops-home rally Bob would’ve despised.
-Taken over a modest environmental protest through the use of junk science and bombasticism and turned into a circus freakshow. (This is the one in whose participation I am most ashamed: I still bear a scar on my hand from that one).
-Felt very proud of a successful anti-logging protest because 30 people were arrested. The trees were logged.
-Felt very proud of a successful pro-immigration protest because the cops waited to arrest the two chained-up yahoos until everyone else had gone home, “afraid” of the assembled jackholes.
-Organized Critical Mass around the world.
-Wasted the energy of kids who wanted to make positive change through endless absurd paranoid discussions of infiltrators, as if law enforcement gave a shit about them.
-Calmly described to me how when the revolution came, they would sincerely and seriously murder the children of bankers.
They’re a stain, a disease, a parasite. Often they corrupt perfectly good causes with their obnoxious counterproductive megalomania. It’s awful.
Just think: if StS had taken the time and energy he’d spent planning and failing to cut the lock and then dealing with that aftermath, and he’d put it toward something useful, what could he have done? He could’ve spent all that time washing dishes at some shitty tourist restaurant, and then he could’ve bought a bunch of blankets and food for homeless folks. It wouldn’t have been much, but at least it would’ve been something. What he did was a total failure.
Left, I agree with you. I suppose I should have added, he’s amusing in a train wreck on the message boards kind of way.
But no one here is ever going to get StS to embrace logic or any adult thinking in his beliefs. Since he has every right to post here its a small good he does by being laughable.
Well, that and perhaps making some reader realize how bonkers his kind of thinking is.
Other than that I doubt he’ll actually contribute anything useful to society.
Well, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt here. Sure, he’s a self-righteous dribble of jerksauce, but he types in complete sentences and has a cogent pathway to a point, even though he’ll never make one. If he makes it out of this phase alive and out of jail, he could go on to do some fair work for the people he’s claiming to champion. Today though, he’s just an asshole.
Pretty much what you would expect from an anarchist: if we can’t get our way the way we’re supposed to use, we’ll get our way using whatever means we have to.
I get all that bj, and respect your intentions to stay safe, but if reality cop programmes show officers who, having ascertained that their ‘pull’ is not likely to pull a gun at any second( You might wish to watch some British versions, to get a comparison.), still go on to treat their ‘pull’ like a retarded child, and get all pissy if the civilian so much as utters a swearword, doesn’t this defeat the object?(Unless the object is a more eventfull arrest - there are “thrill-seekers” in all sorts of occupations.) Maybe this isn’t intended to create a bad impression with the public, but it does.
And the point is, if they are like that when the cameras are rolling, what are they like when they are not?
So, earlier you were a member of the public who could decide whom to exclude from the property (for instance, everyone you didn’t feel like giving a key to), but the public-at-large can’t decide whom to exclude? I like your double standards.
Some anarchists you guys aren’t. Organization? P-shah.
No, you haven’t. It took Tom Brokaw several years to get hundreds of media interviews done; and he worked there.
Hopefully they’re better written than this drivel.
Is now a bad time where I just ask why they don’t get jobs and a place to live? It’s my fault there are more poor people than individual citizens are willing to carry?
But a potato nevertheless. Or is it really your argument that it’s for you to break what laws you want, but not anyone else?
You’re surprised that your shtick doesn’t go over as well with the SDMB as it does with the winos and homeless teenagers? I’m not.
Smashie, it seems that you are laboring under the misapprehension that you are the first anarchist we have ever encountered. You aren’t. Some of us (like LHoD) are recovering anarchists.
Nor are you the first to come waltzing in with the “you all have never heard anything as radical as me before!” attitude. We get some of those every year. Most of them last about as long as you do. It’s rather a shock to discover that you are no longer sure to be the smartest one in the room, and someone else may have heard your oh-so-clever rhetorical flourishes before.
You would be welcome back, if you wanted to drop the patronizing attitude. Very few of us hereabouts are as impressed with your radical chic credentials as the unwashed teenyboppers that seem to be your preferred audience.
I don’t always agree with Shodan’s posts, but like Ashman I agree with him here. My guess is that Smashie will either come back to tell us how we’re all “sheeple” or intellectually inferior to him (which would be a laugh riot, to be honest) or he’ll just disappear.
It’s curious to me because any measure of intellect or education we have will be poo-pooed away. “You spent years getting three PhDs? Awesome, but you don’t know what I know because I read some books and my undisciplined approach to cherry picking what I want to read is superior to your focused education because I did it myself.”
His point will have some aphoristic quality to it. But he’ll ignore that even in college, one isn’t forced to do anything. One chooses one’s majors and interests. Though my reading assignments were, well, assigned, it was no less my choice to read them. And, of course, I’ll have had the benefit of debating what I read with both a putative expert on the topic and those who were at the same, or similar, level of intellect and curiosity as was I. He, unlike the rest of us, didn’t have to suffer through defending a position. He just gets to read something and choose to make it say what he wants.
Unfortunately, he is influential among a certain subset of the population, which is particularly repugnant because these poor bastards are in a situation in which now, more than any other time I’d imagine, it’s important to get good counsel. Instead, they have this Charlatan filling their minds with convincing sounding tripe. It’s most distressing.
But we’re the Usual Suspects! I’m surprised you’re surprised, as I would have expected that you would have expected that all of us liberals would have been kissing his ass. Go figure.
