Tag: Shut Up Slave

Things are Different When You Have a Badge

If you’ve ever been the victim of online harassment and have tried to get the police to intervene you’ve probably been told that, “There’s nothing we can do.” It seems that police departments are entirely powerless when it comes to tracking down online miscreants. Except when somebody online criticizes the police. When that happens they seem to have no problem tracking the person down and sending heavily armed men to kick in their door at oh dark thirty:

AFTER A WATCHDOG BLOG repeatedly linked him and other local officials to corruption and fraud, the Sheriff of Terrebone Parish in Louisiana on Tuesday sent six deputies to raid a police officer’s home to seize computers and other electronic devices.

Sheriff Jerry Larpenter’s deputies submitted affidavits alleging criminal defamation against the anonymous author of the ExposeDAT blog, and obtained search warrants to seize evidence in the officer’s house and from Facebook.

Isn’t it funny how the police are more than capable of identifying anonymous bloggers when they’re the ones being criticized? Things are a bit different for people in the big club.

This is another example of the legal system being used to punish dissent. The First Amendment supposedly covers the right to protest. If your police department is corrupt you’re supposed to have the right to point that out. If you simply don’t like what your police department does you’re supposed to have the right to protest them. But here in the United Police States of America such activity can get your home raided, your computers stolen, and put you in a position where you have to spend money on a lawyer.

It should be noted that this incident isn’t unique:

This isn’t the first time that Louisiana law enforcement officers have challenged those who criticize them. In 2012, Bobby Simmons, a former police officer, was arrested and jailed on a charge of criminal defamation for a letter he wrote to a newspaper regarding another police officer. The charge was later dropped, and Simmons filed a civil suit alleging that his civil rights were violated.

If you’re harassing people online the police will leave you alone. If you’re exercising your supposed First Amendment right to protest the police they will find you and they will use the court system to punish you for being an uppity slave.

The Armed Robbery Epidemic in Minnesota

Did you know there was a rash of armed robberies in Minnesota last month? You wouldn’t have known it from the headlines since the media seemed more interesting in covering the dumpster fires that are the presidential campaigns. But during the month of July over 13,000 Minnesotans were victimized of armed robbers:

ST. PAUL, Minn. – More than 13,000 motorists are a few bucks poorer after being ticketed during a recent statewide speed enforcement crackdown.

The Department of Public Safety (DPS) says officers, deputies and state troopers wrote 13,214 citations for unsafe speeds during the crackdown, that was carried out by more than 300 law enforcement agencies between July 8 and July 22. That compares with 16,410 speeding tickets issued during last year’s campaign.

There were also 1,543 seat belt citations compared with 2,101 in 2015, which suggests a bit of progress in the campaign to improve driving and road safety in Minnesota.

Oh, I guess I was mistaken. Since the men with guns who were robbing people had magic suits and badges these incidents weren’t labeled armed robbery but “traffic citations.” We truly live in a world of Orwellian doublespeak.

I think an important question must be asked now, why were these officers sitting on the highways looking for prey instead of solving crimes? I’ve been told by many statists that there aren’t enough police officers to deal with all of the crime. If that’s the case why are they sitting in their cars instead of finding muggers, rapists, murderers, and thieves?

This is why I roll my eyes whenever some boot licker tells me that I’m only free to criticize cops because the cops are keeping me safe from criminals. The police don’t seem very interested in dealing with criminals. Most of their time seems to be invested in harassing motorists exceeding an arbitrarily chosen speed, kidnaping people using recreational chemicals, and shooting the neighbors of people selling those recreational chemicals (apparently the officers can afford to fuel a BearCat but can’t afford somebody to double-check addresses before a raid).

Guilty by Association

The State of Texas is preparing to execute a man (I know, what else is new). His crime? Being acquainted with a murderer:

They were there to call for Gov. Greg Abbott to halt the impending execution of Been’s uncle, Jeff Wood, who is scheduled to die on August 24, just five days after his 43rd birthday, for a crime that everyone, including prosecutors, admits he did not commit.

[…]

Wood was sitting in a truck outside the Texaco when Danny Reneau went inside and shot Keeran dead. Wood has said he had no idea that Reneau even had a gun or that Reneau would shoot his friend. Yet under the law of parties, prosecutors were allowed to impute to Wood the same level of responsibility for Keeran’s death as Reneau, the triggerman.

An extension of the theory of accomplice liability, the law holds that if two or more conspirators agree to commit one crime — say, a robbery — but instead, one of them commits another crime — say, murder — each party can be held responsible for the murder, regardless of individual intent, based on the notion that the conspirators should have anticipated that the crime committed would actually happen.

Guilt by association isn’t a crime. While Jeff Woods may have been friends with the murderer and in the vehicle with the murderer he wasn’t the murderer and therefore isn’t at fault for the murder. But in the magical Neighborhood of Statist Make-Believe the rules are made up and logic doesn’t matter. Things like having victims or causing damage aren’t necessary for putting a man to death. All that is needed are some arbitrary words written on a piece of paper and voted on by suit-clad mother fuckers in a marble building and suddenly a person can be executed for simply being acquainted with a criminal.

The fact that the State is willing to murder somebody for a murder he didn’t commit should be enough to illustrate the fact that the State doesn’t dispense justice.

To the Gulags, Slaves

The centrally planned paradise of Venezuela is falling apart. People are starving. Animals are starving. And President Maduro keeps making the situation worse by ordering even more central planning. His latest decree, a socialist favorite, is to allow the government to force people to work in the fields:

International human rights activists are complaining that new laws have introduced forced labour in Venezuela.

“A new decree establishing that any employee in Venezuela can be effectively made to work in the country’s fields as a way to fight the current food crisis is unlawful and effectively amounts to forced labor,” Amnesty International said in a statement released on Thursday.

President Nicolás Maduro signed a decree at the end of last week that gives powers to the labor ministry to order “all workers from the public and private sector with enough physical capabilities and technical know-how” to join a government drive aimed at increasing food production.

They can be required to work in the agricultural sector for a 60-day period that can be extended for another 60 days “if the circumstances require it.”

I’m sure mandatory field work can be extended for an infinite number of 60-day periods.

President Maduro is either ignorant of history or a sadistic son of a bitch. The Soviet Union tried collectivizing agriculture and forcing people to work fields and the country never fully recovered from it. Bread lines were the norm until they were replaced by starvation. If you’re a student of history you know that making people slaves does not motivate them to work harder. Instead they work as little as possible to avoid being beaten too severely because they’re not getting anything for their efforts. I guarantee that the poor Venezuelans that are forced to work in the fields will produce very little foodstuff. And why should they? They don’t want to be there, they’re not knowledgable in the skills of agriculture, and they have every right to resist since they’re being coerced.

Venezuela is fucked. It should go down in the history books as yet another demonstration of the futility of central planning.

Screaming at a Wall

It’s election season so a lot of gullible people have developed very strong opinions about which of the two indistinguishable presidential candidates must win in order to stave off the downfall of civilization. These opinions are manifesting online as ridiculous comments that would be considered hyperbole if the commenters didn’t actually appear to believe what they’re posting. I’ve seen comments by a gay woman claiming that anybody who doesn’t vote for Clinton is literally trying to murder her. On the other side of the aisle I’ve seen comments by a well-to-do white man claiming that anybody who doesn’t vote for Trump will be responsible for the downfall of the United States because evil terrorists from the Middle East will flood through its unprotect borders.

How can such ridiculous comments be taken seriously by anybody? Because logic isn’t a play. We’ve devolved debate into an exercise of virtual signaling:

Children are largely deprived of the noble joy of discovering truths as revealed by successful action. Instead they are left with the ignoble gratification of pleasing a taskmaster by reciting an answer that is marked “correct.” And this goes far beyond academics. For the modern child, learning “good behavior” is not about discovering through trial and error what kinds of behaviors are conducive to thriving socially. Instead, it’s about winning praise and avoiding censure from authority figures.

Thanks to this conditioning, we have all become approval-junkies, always on the lookout for our next fix of external validation: for the next little rush of dopamine we get whenever we are patted on the head by others for being a “good boy” or a “good girl,” for exhibiting the right behavior, for giving the right answer, for expressing the right opinion.

This is why the mania for virtue signalling is so ubiquitous, and why orthodoxies are so impervious. Expressing political opinions is not about hammering out useful truths through the crucible of debate, but about signaling one’s own virtue by “tattling” on others for being unvirtuous: for being crypto-commies or crypto-fascists; for being closet racists or race-traitor “cucks;” for being enemies of the poor or apologists for criminals.

We live in a society that teaches children at an early age that truth doesn’t come from experimentation and discovery but from authority figures. Instead of seeking answers through reason we seek them through approval of authority figures. That requires expressing the “right” ideas and expressing them loudly in the hopes that people in authority will hear them and give an approving nod.

This is another side effect of the public indoctrination system. Instead of providing children the tools they need to learn; namely grammar, logic, and rhetoric; public schools focus on making children memorize “facts” and having them prove that they’ve memorized those “facts” by regurgitating them on tests. This focus on memorizing “facts” provided by authority figures often has lifelong ramifications. One such ramification is cognitive dissonance. Take supporters of the drug war, for example. They claim to support drug prohibitions because drugs can kill people. They ignore the fact that the solution they support, prohibition, also kills people. Heroine might kill you over time if you keep using it but an officer shooting you during a no-knock raid performed to find heroine may also kill you. The solution ends up doing the same thing as the problem but most supporters of the war on drugs will ignore you when you point that out. People in authority told them that the solution to drugs killing people is stronger laws and more rigorous law enforcement efforts so that’s what they believe.

Online debates often feel like you’re screaming at a wall because most of the other people debating you aren’t relying on logic. The only way you could get through to them is if you were able to become an authority figure in their eyes. Then they would happily regurgitate whatever you told them was factual.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Chelsea Manning did the American people a service by leaking a great deal of information concerning the government’s activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. For her efforts she was subjected to a military trail and tossed in a cage. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the prospects of being in a cage for the remainder of her life got to her and she attempted suicide. In response the State decided to do what the State does and indulge its sadism:

These new charges, which Army employees verbally informed Chelsea were related to the July 5th incident, include, “resisting the force cell move team;” “prohibited property;” and “conduct which threatens.” If convicted, Chelsea could face punishment including indefinite solitary confinement, reclassification into maximum security, and an additional nine years in medium custody. They may negate any chances of parole.

Instead of providing Manning the psychological help she needs, the State is planning on making her torment even worse but subjecting her to solitary confinement (which they did to her when she was being held while awaiting trail). This isn’t about justice, it’s about a sick desire for revenge. She disobeyed the State and now the State doesn’t merely want to punish her, it wasn’t to torture her for the rest of her life. It really is akin to the Room 101 scene from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Sex Offender Registry is Bullshit

The sex offender registry, like all government registries, is bullshit. How can I say that? Do I want neighborhoods to be ignorant of the sexual predators living within them? Do I want sexual predators to be free to roam the streets and prey on the innocent? These are the kinds of questions I’m asked when I state my opposition of the registry. Obviously I don’t want any such things. But I subscribe to Blackstone’s formulation, which states “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

When people think of the sex offender registry they think of creepy middle-aged men fondling children or raping women. The reality is far different. What’s the most common age of people charged with sex offense? It’s not 40. It’s not 50. It’s 14:

But in fact, the most common age that people are charged with a sex offense is 14. That’s according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice. Why so young? I explain:

Because people tend to have sex with people around their own age, which means young people tend to have sex with other young people. And much under-age sex is illegal.

So we keep throwing kids on the registry and labeling them sex offenders, as if they’re incorrigible monsters. But in Britain, a study recently commissioned by Parliament has recommended a totally different course: Trying to understand, treat and refrain from labeling the kids, since children often “make mistakes as they start to understand their sexuality and experiment with it.”

If a teenager takes a picture of their junk and consensually sends it to another teenager then both are in possession of child pornography and therefore fall under the criteria of the sex offender registry. The sex offender registry is ruining the lives of people who have done nothing wrong and aren’t even old enough to buy a cigarette or even face trail as an adult. In other words, we have a lot of innocent people suffering.

Nobody should be surprised by this. This is how government registries always work. They’re sold as a mechanism to keep track of the bad people in society but they end up filled with innocent people. I’m sure many of the teenagers who are listed as sex offenders got on the list because some judge decided that teenagers having sex is immoral and that putting them on the list would make an example of them.

Report Wrongthinking Children to the Ministry of Love

How dangerous are small children? Most rational adults would say that small children are’t very dangerous. The State, however, thinks that every child is a potential terrorist. Because of its irrational paranoia it often uses its public indoctrination camps schools to monitor children for wrongthink:

Are these the tell-tale signs of kids at risk of committing violence: An 8-year-old who wore a t-shirt saying he wanted to be like a seventh-century Muslim leader? A 17-year-old who sought to draw attention to the water shortage in Gaza by handing out leaflets? A 4-year-old who drew a picture of his dad slicing a vegetable?

Teachers and school officials in the United Kingdom thought so, and they referred these children for investigation as potential terrorists. They were interrogated by U.K. law enforcement. They’re likely subject to ongoing monitoring, with details of their childhoods maintained in secret government files potentially indefinitely.

[…]

Why should any of this concern Americans? Because the FBI wants to do something a little bit too close for comfort in U.S. schools, and American schoolchildren may come under similar suspicion and scrutiny.

While there’s no similar government-imposed duty on American schools, U.S. CVE initiatives are based on the Prevent model. Due to this, a core component of the U.S. CVE plan tasks teachers, social workers, and school administrators with monitoring and reporting to law enforcement on children in their care. An FBI document released earlier this year tells teachers to spy on their students’ thoughts and suggests that administrators essentially turn schools into mini-FBI offices. Rights Watch’s report shows what might happen if American schools actually follow the FBI’s proposals.

I wonder if teachers who turn in students receive a reward like people who call one of those crime tip lines?

When I express hatred for public schools I’m usually accused of wanting a world where only wealthy children can afford an education. It’s a straw man argument because I’ve never expressed an interest in restricting education to wealthy children. In fact, I’ve pointed out that education today is cheaper than ever before. My problem with public schools, besides the fact that they suck at providing education, is that they’re used as government indoctrination centers.

I remember a lot of my time in school was wasted with mindless flag worshipping. Until I entered middle school we were required to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning. It was our mandatory morning prayer to the religion of statism. History was almost always focused on the United States and it wasn’t viewed with any critical thinking. The United States was almost always in the right and always the greatest country in human history. Geography wasn’t much different. We spent a tremendous amount of time learning the geography of the United States. Beyond that we covered a few European countries here and there and maybe one or two South American countries. What little economics education we received was, of course, nonsense Keynesian bullshit. You know the usual. A gold-based currency cannot work, inflation is good and deflation is terrible, only governments have the right to create money, etc. And there was D.A.R.E. Supposedly a program to keep kids off of drugs, D.A.R.E. was really a program to trick children into trusting the police. I still remember several police officers coming to the school under D.A.R.E. to tell us that the police are our friends (yet anything you say to them can and will be used against you).

More concerning than the indoctrination though was the pursuit of wrongthinkers. I was one of those wrongthinkers and was therefore specifically targeted. Were I going through high school today I’m sure my principal would have reported me to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) instead of the local police department and my entire existence would have been surveilled for the remainder of my life.

If you put your children into the public education system the State is going to do its damnedest to turn them into unthinking patriotic boot lickers. If your children fail to take to the programming they will be labeled wrongthinkers and may get themselves an FBI record before they’re old enough to buy a beer. Keep your kids out of the fucking public indoctrination camps if at all possible. They won’t get an education there but they will come to the attention of Big Brother.

Don’t Think of It as Rigging, Think of It as Investing

This year’s Democratic National Convention (DNC) may be the greatest public display of cognitive dissonance in history. Through leaked e-mails we’ve learned that the Democratic Party primaries were being manipulated by the DNC to favor Hillary. I was hoping that Bernie’s supporters were going to react by flipping every table at the DNC and storming out. Instead many of them are latching onto the suspicion that the e-mails were acquired by Russia as fact and using that to sweep the entire affair under the rug. Apparently factual information ceases being factual if Russia acquired it.

Political corruption is nothing new. Politics itself is an exercise in corruption. But the e-mails give us an interesting insight into the payoffs. Take the DNC’s former chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The leaked e-mails revealed that she used her position to rig the election in Hillary’s favor. Although this revelation forced her to resign, she was immediately snapped up by the Hillary campaign:

Ms. Wasserman Schultz was widely criticized during the Democratic primary by supporters of Bernie Sanders of using her position at the DNC to tip the race toward Mrs. Clinton. At least some of that was confirmed at the weekend by the release by Wikileaks of internal DNC emails, which forced her to announce her resignation Sunday.

But in a reaction statement to reporters Sunday, Mrs. Clinton gave Ms. Wasserman Schultz a soft landing by announcing that she would join the Clinton campaign.

Corruption is becoming more blatant now than ever before. It used to be that a scandal like this would require somebody like Wasserman Schultz to stay out of the public limelight for at least a few weeks before joining another political organization. Now corrupt politicos can jump right into the next political organization and nobody gives a damn.

Wasserman Schultz is just one example of the corruption going on in the DNC. Another example revealed by the leaked e-mails is how the DNC planned to give large donors federal appointments:

Democratic National Committee documents recently released by WikiLeaks include spreadsheets and emails that appear to show party officials planning which donors and prominent fundraisers to provide with appointments to federal boards and commissions.

[…]

The records, which WikiLeaks released along with nearly 20,000 hacked DNC emails and other documents on Friday, also expose one of the Beltway’s worst kept secrets: that wealthy politicos can often buy their way to presidential appointments.

Worst kept secret is right. Like most corrupt activity that occurs in the political realm, the fact that big donors received special privileges was well known. What these e-mails provided was proof. Writing off accusations of such payoffs can no longer be relegated to the realm of conspiracy theories.

What’s the lesson from these leaked e-mails? The same lesson we always learn about democratic systems: your vote doesn’t matter. Every dollar and hour donated to Bernie’s campaign was wasted. Not only did Bernie sell out in the end by endorsing Hillary, but he had no chance of winning anyways because the DNC itself was manipulating things behind the scenes to ensure Hillary received the nomination. Bernie, effectively, only existed to create the illusion that there was a choice for the Democratic Party presidential nominee. But the DNC had already decided on its candidate and from there on it was predestined that Hillary would win by hook or by crook.

Police Blast Yet Another Nonthreatening Person

In addition to having a carry permit while black, being a therapist while black is also grounds for being shot in the United Police States of America:

Charles Kinsey, who works with people with disabilities, told WSVN television he was helping a patient who had wandered away from a facility.

Mobile phone video shows Mr Kinsey lying down with his hands in the air, and his patient sitting in the road with a toy truck.

The latest shooting follows weeks of violence involving police.

North Miami Assistant Police Chief Neal Cuevas said officers were called out on Monday, following reports of a man threatening to shoot himself.

Police ordered Mr Kinsey and the patient to lie on the ground, he told The Miami Herald.

The video shows Mr Kinsey lying down while trying to get his patient to comply.

It seems therapists lying on the ground trying to help mentally disabled patients who have toys trucks is grounds for an office fearing for his life now. These officers are either the biggest cowards on the face of the planet or they’re the most psychotic. Either way, they shouldn’t be given power over others.

The progression we’re seeing is as interesting as it is alarming. Before this year the people being gunned down by the police tended to have a criminal history for boot lickers to use to justify the shooting. But now the police are becoming so brazen that they’re gunning down people who have little or no criminal background to speak of. Since they’re not being punished for their actions they’re also not motivated to stop escalating situations to deadly force.

This situation also demonstrates that the boot lickers’ claim that people won’t get shot if they obey the orders of officers is false. Kinsey was lying on the ground with his hands in the air as the officers had ordered him to do and they still shot him. When you use threats of violence as a compliance mechanism and you fail to uphold your end of the bargain, that is to say you still attack your victim even if they do comply with you, you wreck what little trust you have between yourself and your victim. That makes future scenarios more difficult. Your new victims may decided to fight back instead of complying because they believe you’ll kill them either way but they might possibly survive if they resist. By shooting a complying person the officer increased the danger of future situations involving officers using threats of violence as a compliance mechanism.

The problem of police brutality will only continue to get worse since few seems to have the will to take action to curtail it.