Dark Days

[salvorhardin]

I don't think I've heard John Wilkins sound quite so dismal before. I can't say as I disagree with him though.

Once upon a time, punishment followed the crime, and the people who committed the criminal acts were held to account. Now, punishment not only can precede the crime, but individuals who happen to be inadvertently involved can also be punished, even if, and this seems to me to undercut the very existence of our code of law, they had no way to prevent themselves being involved in the criminal act!

So if someone happens to use my car for a crime, I can be punished by having my car confiscated, without any proof I was involved or knew of the crime ahead of time, and without any charges being laid and tested in court. This principle of pre-emptive punishment is more than draconian, it is Kafkaesque. It makes no sense, legally. The only justification for it has to be that it means statutory instruments of government can control the situation as they wish, without either having to do due diligence of investigation and evidence gathering, or testing their claims in open court.

We are living, I am afraid to say, in the dawn of the world of totalitarianism. It has been coming for a while.

Full post: http://evolvingthoughts.net/2012/01/dark-days/

[mucifer]

1. It is at it's worse for people of color who don't have much money.

The system is against them. They can be charged for crimes they didn't commit and brainwashed through interrogation techniques that can last over 24 hours straight until they confess to crimes they haven't committed. They often have horrible lawyers defending them. The cops troll certain neighborhoods harassing kids. It's REALLY bad.

[salvorhardin]

3. Yep

John's post is about SOPA/PIPA and the abuse of civil liberties under the guise of protecting intellectual property, but there are countless avenues of Kafkaesque (to use John's word) totalitarian intrusion into our lives. You hit on one that illustrates how we're still a racist society despite having theoretically made African Americans equal under the law. The following poster points out how the "War on Drugs" is used to further entrench power.

[Nay]

5. And not just ppl of color, either. My (white) son was harassed by cops for years. He changed cars

and, miraculously, the harassment stopped. They obviously were looking for his car and busting his chops for anything. He now has NO respect for the cops at all. Can't say I blame him.

[mucifer]

6. I say that because the state of IL death penalty was overturned because

they found many were on death row because they were tortured into false confessions. They were all African American.

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/macarthur/police/burge.html

[WingDinger]

2. War on drugs, means your property is not granted constitutional rights and you, a person can be depr

deprived of them.

Thus, you need to make corporations persons, as they too could be confiscated. For acts deemed worthy.

[patrice]

4. This habit of thought is a cultural trait now. Although the labels for it have varied between

Preemptive and Preventative, as in:

- the difference between actions based upon an empirically rational degree of probability of a given relatively specific event, which we, due to that degree of probability, act to preempt;

- compared to abstract emotional assumptions about entire categories of general events with almost entirely un-specified probabilities, any and all of which we seek to prevent, no matter how improbable they are.

Preemption, pre-Bush Dynasty, was the more conservative PERSONA.

With the invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation known as Iraq, Prevention became the PUBLIC modus operandi, which allowed Americans to publicly validate the killing of at least 100,000 Iraqis for events that were VERY significantly improbable.

The number of Americans sacrificed to that effort and the over-all count of wounded, displaced, suffering and dead in both of our nations, not to mention how critically crippled our economy has become due, in significant part, to war debt, are clear examples that SUPPORT your contentions about how common and acceptable totalitarian "Prevention" is now . . . though Prevention has, apparently, been the covert modus operandi of the U.S. foreign policy at least ever since the end of WWII.

Interesting fact: Blowback, both foreign and domestic, demonstrates that Prevention doesn't prevent anything; it ONLY stimulates it, which fact probably affects the potential success of Preemption (domestic or foreign) were any such thing authentically attempted.

P.S. Not too happy with these labels, Preempt vs. Prevent, perhaps there's a better way to refer to these sets of assumptions, but this IS the way they were used up until this kind of discussion ended with the ascendance of the Bush Dynasty.