independent alternatives to the malestream media
This is the illustration accompanying the Willamette Week’s endorsement of Obama:
The editors are careful to note that Obama “is not divine.” But he does walk on water and is accompanied everywhere by white horses and cascading rose petals.
Cops are here to protect you. (#4)
from Rad Geek @ Rad Geek People's Daily 11 May 2008 1:05 pmCops are here to protect you from anonymous 13 year old shoplifters by slamming them down to the ground, choking them, punching them, handcuffing them, and torturing them with 50,000-volt electric shocks. Here’s the latest from Niagara Falls, New York:
This is what happened to 13-year-old Dominic Gualttieri after he says police stopped him outside a laundromat and accused him of shoplifting.
Dominic Gualttieri said,
He asked for my name and I’m like, I’m a kid you don’t know, you don’t need to know my name because I didn’t do anything.—Alysha Palumbo, WIVB Buffalo (2008-05-07): Niagara Falls teenager claims police brutality
Confused and enraged by some punk kid actually acting like he belongs to himself and not to the police, here is what the cops did:
What happened next shocked one man so much he took pictures of the melee.
Witness:
They threw him on the ground. They tased him. They choked him. They punched him.
I can still hear his voice. His scream was like a scream of death. A 13-year-old boy should not be screaming like that.—Alysha Palumbo, WIVB Buffalo (2008-05-07): Niagara Falls teenager claims police brutality
The pigs, of course, have tried to defend this over-the-top violence by saying that it was all done By The Book (which of course makes it O.K.), and pointing out that Officer Jack Miljour ended up a broken bone in his left arm during the struggle.
Or rather, Officer Jack Miljour got a fractured elbow
in his effort to beat up an unarmed boy and wrestle him to the pavement. Thus Officer Jack Miljour needed to gang up with his buddy in order to beat up a 13 year old boy, slam him on the ground, torture him with 50,000-volt electric shocks, choke him, and punch him, in order to to hold the youth down so he could get control and handcuff him.
Why the fuck they needed to force a 13 year old boy down and handcuff him in the first place, or how this could be even remotely proportional to any offense that he may have committed, is, strange to say, left completely unexplained. Perhaps because it is supposed to be so obvious. I mean, hell, if they didn’t, he might have possibly have gotten away while still suspected of ganking an energy drink. This, in the minds of Niagara Falls Police, is doing what had to be done.
As a result, the 13-year-old boy who was beaten and tasered by the cops is being charged with assault.
Self-identified professional special-ed childcare worker Lori,
of Buffalo, New York, has this to add to WIVB’s comments thread on the story:
For starters, this kid should have been taught to have respect for adults, especially a police officer!! He was simply asked his name. He needed to answer accordingly. Your first mistake kid! And the
abuseissue? I work in a program that deals with children ages 5-12 with behavioral issues. It doesn’t matter if it’s one of the 5 yr olds or 12 yr olds, if they’re having a bad day and start togo off, it sometimes takes 3 adults to get them under control and that’s without a laser [sic] gun! If this kid’s adrenaline was flowing, I’m sure those officers could have used more help to subdue this mouthy kid.
And freelance sado-fascist bully boy Tax Paying Citizen,
of Cranbury, New Jersey, would like to say:
Well, next time a peace officer asks for his name, maybe he will comply.
Damn kids with their parents supporting their insubordination to law enforcment…
—
Tax Paying Citizen,(2008-05-08): Re: WIVB Buffalo: Niagara Falls teenager claims police brutality
Please note that, in the minds of those who rush to defend cops from police brutality allegations, you and I and our neighbors ought to make sure we act as subordinates to government peace officers.
And that the threat of assault and battery is a good way to ensure that we comply
with our superiors’ arbitrary commands.
There is a lot more to add here, but honestly I just can’t. I’m much too angry, and much too tired, to say much of anything more, and whatever else I could say would hardly be anything new. For what I might say, by way of analysis and context, just re-read:
It’s the same God-damned thing every day, so going on about it any further would just be so much cut-and-paste.
Support your local CopWatch.
(Story thanks to Mike Gogulski.)
Rapists in uniform #3: a sixth woman comes forward
from Rad Geek @ Rad Geek People's Daily 11 May 2008 12:40 am(Via Google News.)
Another woman in northern Ohio has come forward about an unnecessary and sexually humiliating strip search by the Stark County sheriff’s office. She is the sixth woman who has come forward about the Stark County sheriff’s office in the past four months. Like four other women, she came forward after learning about Hope Steffey’s gang-rape search at the hands of male and female deputies, and her lawsuit against the sheriff’s office. Elizabeth
is afraid for her own safety and the safety of her family, so she has chosen not to use her last name or reveal her face in press interviews. She says that she never gave any indication of being suicidal, believes that she was stripped and left naked in her cell as retaliation for physically defending herself against a deputy who had laid his hand on her hip and made sexual jokes at her expense.
STARK COUNTY — A Stark County woman told Channel 3 News Investigator Tom Meyer that she was told to remove all her clothes inside the Stark County Jail after deputies made several off-color remarks.
Elizabethfears reprisals for speaking out so she prefers we not use her last name.She says a Stark County Sheriff’s deputy pulled her over one night for failing to signal during a lane change. Elizabeth says she had to undergo a field sobriety test. According to the officer’s incident report, she failed some aspects of the test. She was arrested for driving under the influence and taken to the station for further testing.
She was told to blow into a breathylyzer, but she suffers from asthma. When she failed to produce enough air, she says a deputy told her,
Baby we both know you can blow harder than that.She says a second deputy laughed. The officer marked her as arefusalfor not blowing harder.Elizabeth decided to tell her story when she saw video of Hope Steffey strip searched by both male and female deputies. Steffey was left naked in a cell for 6 hours.
When Elizabeth was told to remove all her clothes, she did so voluntarily saying she worked at a medium security prison in Ohio and knew her clothes would be forcibly removed if she failed to obey.
The incident report says Elizabeth wanted to commit suicide. But she says that’s just not true.
I’ve never been suicidal. I’m not suicidal. I was terrified,she told the Investigator. The Sheriff’s office said medical personnel decide if an inmate should be placed on suicide watch, not sheriff deputies.Elizabeth was charged with drinking and driving, and assault for kicking a deputy. She decided to defend herself when a deputy placed his hands on her hips. She explained that she had been the victim of a sexual assault while employed at the prison.
The assault charge in the Stark County case was dropped on the condition she plead guilty to operating a vehicle while intoxicated. She reluctantly took the deal.
According to the local news video about Elizabeth (trigger warning: contains video of Hope Steffey being forcibly strip searched by male officers), Elizabeth was left locked in her cell, completely naked, for eight hours.
Lawyer David Malik says
we’re seeing a pattern where apparently every woman who cries or gets emotional is deemed suicidal.
And remember, if you are deemed suicidal, government cops and government jailers will take it for granted that the best way for armed Trained Professionals to handle the situation is to hurt you, hold you down, strip you against your will, subject you to an invasive search, and lock you in a cage and leave you there, naked, for six or eight hours at a stretch.
There is absolutely no conceivable excuse for treating anyone this way, ever. Whether man or woman, calm or belligerent,
nice or nasty, crazy or sane. This is gang rape, professionalized and excused by Official Procedures. What is becoming clear is that Sheriff Tim Swanson and his goon squad not only have convinced themselves that this kind of brutality is sometimes acceptable, but also that they have an especially broad understanding of the sort of situation that calls for it, and that they are especially willing to use it as a form of humiliating retaliation, in order to teach uppity or unruly women a lesson, under color of the law. And then, to crown all, to further insult the victim by proclaiming that they did it all For Her Own Good. The Stark County sherriff’s office are nothing more and nothing less than a pack of dangerous sexual predators, and their uniforms and badges don’t make them any better than any other gang of serial rapists.
Just following ordersedition
Cops are here to protect you. (#3)
from Rad Geek @ Rad Geek People's Daily 10 May 2008 5:03 pmLet’s review.
Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies. They routinely force their way into situations where they are hardly needed or wanted; they deliberately escalate confrontations in order to get control of the situation
through superior belligerence; they routinely hurt people, use force first and ask questions later; and they invariably pass off even the most egregious violence against harmless or helpless people as self-defense
or as the necessary
means to accomplish a completely unnecessary goal. In order to to coerce compliance with their arbitrary commands, they have no trouble electrifying small children, pregnant women, 82 year old women who just want their social workers to leave them alone, alleged salad-bar thieves, 75 year old grandmothers guilty of blocking the line at a McDonald’s drive-through, or an already prone and helpless student who may have been guilty of using the computer lab without proper papers on hand. They are willing to beat a handcuffed woman bloody for demanding to use the phone, to slam a 13-year-old boy to the ground and choke him in order to arrest him for the crime of skateboarding in public, to rough up teenaged girls who don’t clean up enough spilled birthday cake or walk home too late at night, or to throw a quadriplegic man out of his wheelchair for not standing up on command. When they deal with non-police officers (the people that we call our friends and neighbors,
and who the police contemptuously dismiss as civilians
), they have been trained to assert full-spectrum dominance at every opportunity, and they are willing to end a tiresome argument with pain compliance
techniques, which include pepper spraying lawyers who ask inconvenient questions, or using a 50,000-volt electric shock to disable an unarmed, retreating
woman, or tackling a 17-year-old girl and tasering her while she lies helpless in her own bed, or shocking a man in front of his family and leaving him lying on the side of the highway (in order to make absolutely sure they could serve him with a dubious traffic ticket). It hardly matters if you cannot obey their commands because you are sound asleep in your own home. It hardly matters if you can’t move due to a medical condition, or can’t hear their bellowed orders because you’re deaf. It hardly even matters if you die. What cops can always count on is that, no matter how aggressively they escalate the confrontation in the name of control,
no matter how quickly they resort to violence, and no matter how obviously innocent or helpless their victims are, they can always count on their bosses and their colleagues to repeat absolutely any lie and make absolutely any excuse in order to find that Official Procedures were followed. As long as Official Procedures were followed, of course, any form of brutality or violence is therefore passed off as OK by the boss cops, and the judgment will be dutifully repeated by fellow cops, by prosecutors, by judges, by much of the news media, and by the hordes of freelance howling cop-enablers who rush into any media forum they can find to publish excuses for any and every cop accused of brutality, while they also use absolutely any means necessary to smear, humiliate and blame any and every victim who ever comes forward.
Even if a cop arrests an assault victim for interfering with the Investigation of her own assault, and then forces her into a cell where she can be strip-searched, over her screams of protest, with male guards wrenching her arms and holding her down, we are informed that these gang rapists were Just Following Orders. Cops are also elaborately trained in the use and abuse of the legal system, and know very well which judges are most likely to absolve them of any wrongdoing. The completely unsurprising result is that violent cops hardly ever face any personal costs whatsoever for their actions: if anything happens at all, the worst of it is usually that they are given a paid vacation and an administrative reprimand, or at worst they may be fired. Even if they are fired, they are hardly ever face legal consequences for their violence, and if they do, the city government can be relied on to settle and force taxpayers to cover the tab. Even if they are sued, they are hardly ever arrested for their violence. And even if they are arrested, they are hardly ever convicted. It doesn’t even matter if they as much as confess in open court. With few exceptions, the best that most victims of police violence can realistically ever hope for by way of compensation is an Oops, our bad
, and a Fuck you, civilian
is what they are far more likely to get. No matter how many times these same things happen, again and again, and no matter how often they are repeated within the same police department—or even at the same shift in the same office—and no matter how widely they are repeated in so many different police departments across so many different cities and counties, every time the latest outrage comes up in the newsmedia, a cop mouthpiece can be expected to say, and the establishment media can be expected to dutifully report, that nobody should rush to judgment,
that they should dismiss eye-witness testimony and even the evidence of their senses in order to give the cops every possible (and some impossible) benefit of the doubt, and that even if these cops did do something wrong, well, it’s just A Few More Bad Apples committing Yet Another Isolated Incident. If anyone so much as dares to suggest that something may be systemically wrong here, beyond what can be fixed by punishing a few bad cops, or through superficial reforms and sensitivity training, then they are dismissed by comfortable political Moderates as irresponsible crazies, while cops and their sycophants can be expected to respond with the usual fragile macho flash of crying about how they get no respect, while sanctimoniously bellowing about how they risk so much serving and protecting
those who never asked for, and never freely agreed to, their service or their protection.
The result, which is completely predictable and completely outrageous, is that individual cops and entire police departments in America deliberately take on the posture of occupying paramilitary forces, with the express intent of spreading fear
in what they regard as hostile territory, and that, on a daily basis, many cops routinely engage in rampant, intense, unchecked violence against anyone and everyone who happens to get in their way or look at them funny, no matter how many options the cops may have and no matter how harmless or helpless their victims may be. Thus, while investigating his neighbors, they will happily break into a suspect
60-year-old man’s home, while he is recovering from surgery, trash his house without a warrant or probable cause, rip a catheter out of his body, and leave him there to suffer without medical attention, even after they apparently found absolutely nothing to indicate his guilt:
HARTFORD, Conn. — A man alleges that police entered his home illegally and ripped a catheter from his body during a child pornography investigation that led to the arrest of two neighbors.
Andrew Glover, 60, of New Britain filed a notice with the city Thursday that he intends to pursue a federal civil rights lawsuit. He accused the officers of inflicting severe injuries as he was recovering from intestinal surgery in February.
Glover’s lawyer, Paul Spinella, said police entered Glover’s apartment Jan. 30 and Feb. 28. Glover wasn’t involved in child pornography, has not been charged and has no criminal record, Spinella said.
The poor guy,Spinella said.They ripped the catheter off his person. They assaulted the guy. He’s got major problems as a result of this. He’s a mess now.Lt. James Wardwell, a police spokesman, said Friday that the department had not received the intent-to-sue notice and would not comment. A message was left for the city’s corporation counsel.
Glover has two years to file a lawsuit in U.S. District Court.
Spinella said officers
tossedGlover’s apartment during a search Jan. 30. In February, he said, Glover returned home from the hospital after his surgery to find officers searching his apartment again. That’s when they assaulted Glover and left him alone in the apartment without calling for medical help, Spinella said.The police didn’t have search warrants, Spinella said.
Meanwhile, in Kamloops, British Columbia, in order to subdue a frail 82 year old man, on an oxygen tank, who had undergone heart bypass surgery, who could not hurt anyone outside the reach of a small knife, cops were willing to blast him three times in the chest with a 50,000-volt electric shock while he lay helpless in his hospital bed. Because they had work to get done that night:
An elderly man in Kamloops, B.C., was zapped three times on the torso by a police stun gun while lying on his hospital bed, CBC News has learned.
Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the Taser marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.
They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery,Lasser told CBC News.Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.
RCMP said nurses called police after Lasser became delirious and pulled a knife out of his pocket.
Lasser told CBC News that he sometimes becomes delusional when he can’t breathe properly. He said he couldn’t explain why he refused to let go of the knife even after the Mounties arrived.
I was laying on the bed by then and the corporal came in, or the sergeant, I forget which it was, and said to the guys,Lasser said.OK, get him because we got more important work to do on the street tonight,
And then, bang, bang, bang, three times with the laser, and I tell you, I never want that again.Kamloops RCMP said Thursday that officers had no other option but to deploy the conducted energy weapon when Lasser refused to drop his knife.
—CBC News (2008-05-09): RCMP subdue hospitalized man, 82, with Taser
In Philadelphia, a police commissioner says that, while On the surface, it certainly does not look good,
people should not rush to judgment
over an aerial video which clearly shows a swarm of Philadelphia police officers dragging suspects out of a car, then repeatedly beating and kicking them while they lay handcuffed and held down on the ground. Remind me again of how the good guys
who do this are morally any different from the Bloods or the Crips?
The reason that you should suspend your judgment on this vicious gang beat-down of helpless, restrained suspects
by a huge crowd of the Gangsters in Blue is that The video is the video … We have no audio. You don’t know what was going on at that moment when the officers approached the vehicle. There will be an investigation and we will move on.
Well. I am sure that after The Matter Is Investigated, and nothing of any consequence happens to these dangerous, heavily armed, tightly-organized gangs of batterers, the Philadelphia Police Department and city government sure will move on, with business as usual, and not a damn thing will change. Besides which, think of how hard the poor cops have it when a fellow cop was killed on the job not long ago. Because those trained professionals who, at every opportunity, sanctimoniously inform us of all the risks that they voluntarily take on For Our Own Good, cannot possibly be expected to do their jobs without beating the shit out of helpless captives if it should ever happen that one of them is hurt or killed. This is how these dedicated public servants serve and protect the public: by hurting innocent or helpless people under their power, by taking out the stress and risks of their own chosen profession on members of the public who pose no threat to them, and then by lying, dissembling, making excuses, and crying about it if anyone should happen to take issue with this reign of terror being carried on by peace officers
in the name of Public Safety. Cops are here to protect you. Cops are here to protect the hell out of you, whether you want it or not, and you had better not get in the way.
When every fucking week brings another story of a Few More Bad Apples causing Yet Another Isolated Incident, and the police department almost invariably doing everything in its power to conceal, excuse, or minimize the violence, even in defiance of the evidence of the senses and no matter how obviously harmless or helpless the victim may be, it beggars belief to keep on claiming that there is no systemic problem here, that cops ought to be given every benefit of the doubt, and that any blanket condemnation of American policing is a sign of hastiness and unfair prejudice. The plain fact is that what we have here is one of two things: either a professionalized system of control which tacitly permits and encourages cops to exercise this kind of rampant, repeated, intense, and unrepentant abuse against powerless people—or else a system which has clearly demonstrated that it can do nothing effectual to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
(Via Scott Hagaman @ Scottish Nous 2008-05-10: Is Bad Cop
Redundant Yet?, Mike Gogulski @ nostate.com 2008-05-09: Philadelphia police beating restrained suspects: video, Lindsay Beyerstein @ Majikthise 2008-05-09: Cops tase 82-year-old heart patient in bed, and Pam Spaulding 2008-05-09: Canada: 82-year old heart patient Tased in hospital bed.)
From sniper fire to nomination chances: Hillary Clinton’s grasp of reality
from Media Girl @ media girl - progressive, feminist, empowered 09 May 2008 9:53 pmShe keeps going and going and going.... But at this point, does she's sounding like Bush does when he talks about Iraq.
She's lost her grasp. Either that, or she's actually fighting a bloody fight for control of the Democratic Party, election be damned. I can't see her continuous attacks on Barack Obama any other way.
I just got this on an email list:
Could you pass some info on to the rest of the callers that are calling into WV?
I’ve been talking with some people already on the ground in WV and the Obama camp is calling voters, NOT to get out the vote, but to ask for money - campaign donations. The gist of the call is that its not important that they vote, because the election is over, and then they ask for money to help put this primary campaign to an end and move on to the general election. Basically, they are telling voters its over. Then they ask for $400 donations. What the dollar amount is about, I don’t know. Perhaps they are just getting greedy.
(Note to readers: I’m going to return shortly to the subject of this post, because there’s a lot more to add to the discussion. But I want to get this out first, because time is of the essence.)
Hillary is on track to recover the lead in the popular vote, winning big victories in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico. She’ll go into the summer with the majority of popular votes, a near-tie in pledged delegates, and a strong argument for the supers that she should be the nominee.
But you wouldn’t know that from the media.
Let’s review: Indiana was the tie-breaker, as Obama himself said it would be. He predicted that Hillary would win Pennsylvania, he would win North Carolina, and Indiana would break the tie.
Hillary won Indiana. She broke the tie.
But a strange thing happened: the media – and the Obama campaign – simply ignored reality. They created their own reality (and where have we seen that before?). In one of the most striking incidents of Orwellianism I’ve ever seen in this country, the pundits and politicians ignored the fact that Hillary had won the tie-breaker and instead declared that Obama was now the “presumptive nominee.” Tim Russert announced that “we now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it” (as if it were up to him). Time magazine rolled out a cover with a big picture of Obama and a headline reading, “And the winner is….”. The Obama campaign leaked word that Barack would hold a victory party on May 20.
It’s the ultimate haka.*
And it’s effective, make no mistake. If you ever doubted that the media in this country creates the news rather than reports it – that the Village idiots are the ones picking our presidents – then this should settle it. The media colluded with the Bush campaign in 2000 to destroy Al Gore and force Shrub down our throats, and now they’re doing the same thing with Hillary and Obama.
It’s so effective that many of the Hillary blogs are in a miasma of despair. Hillary supporters are discouraged. Hillary voters in West Virginia and Kentucky are wondering if they should even bother.
Which is the whole point.
A haka is a war dance designed to intimidate the opposition. It’s a psych-out. A mind-fuck. It’s not a victory dance, because the battle hasn’t happened yet; it’s an intimidation dance. It’s designed to scare the opposition into freaking out or going home.
This haka-to-end-all-hakas is happening because of what I said in the first paragraph up at the top of the post. The Obama camp is desperate to stop Hillary in her tracks.
I realize now that this particular haka was originally scheduled for the night of the Pennsylvania primary. The Time magazine cover, the editorials, the “presumptive nominee” crap – all that was in the chute and ready to go a couple of weeks ago. That’s why the media boyz were so glum that night; all their plans had been ruined. Hillary’s victory margin in Pennsylvania was just too big.
But Indiana – that was close. Somehow, somewhere it was decided that if Indiana was close enough, the haka would go forward. It’s possible that the chicanery in Gary was actually part of the plan to make sure the margin was narrow.
And so the haka is in full blast, everywhere you look, every time you turn on the tube, every time you pick up a newspaper. And I say to hell with it.
The most important thing now is to get out the vote in West Virginia and Kentucky. Those states are overwhelmingly for Hillary, and if the voters there get the message that their votes still count, then Hillary can still win the race.
What you can do right now is call. Phone bank for Hillary. It’s easy as pie – I’ve done it, and it’s simple and painless. It’s especially fun in West Virginia, because the folks there love Hillary so much. They just need to be reassured that their votes still count. That there’s still a reason to go to the polls next Tuesday.
Kentucky also needs callers, and Oregon has an impressive ground game for Hillary that’s going on right now (it’s a mail-in primary).
From there it will be on to Puerto Rico, where Hillary could net a quarter of a million votes in one shot.
Here’s a widget to get you into the Hillary Action center:
Click on “Make Calls” there in the bottom red bar.
Come on, folks! Let’s do it!
*Coined by Riverdaughter, based on the pre-game war dance performed by the New Zealand football team.
Bow down before the one you serve
from Rad Geek @ Rad Geek People's Daily 09 May 2008 4:25 pm(Via Lew Rockwell 2008-05-09: Young Heretics vs. the Flag Religion.)
I spent my first few years of school in a Montessori co-op school with a large contingent of aging New Leftists and burned-out hippie types among the parents. But after that it was all government schools, and, as far as I can remember, every government school I ever attended started business each day with the Pledge of Allegiance. I started having problems with the Pledge around the time I got to junior high school; I didn’t like being expected to chant out one nation, under God,
and I figured it violated my religious liberty, so I stopped saying that. In high school I refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance at all, and I usually wouldn’t stand up, either, unless I felt like someone in the room was eyeing me. It’s not that I was trying to make some kind of anarchist protest; I was a fairly boring sort of Democratic Party-identified state Leftist for most of the time I was in high school, and didn’t become an anarchist until after I spent a couple years kicking around more radical forms of Leftism in college. But even then I considered the whole ritual Strength-Through-Unity exercise stifling and creepy, and I didn’t want to participate. So I feel a lot of personal, not just political, solidarity for these three teenagers in western Minnesota:
Three small-town eighth-graders were suspended for not standing at the start of the school day Thursday for the Pledge of Allegiance.
My son wasn’t being defiant against America,said Kim Dahl, mother of one of the students, Brandt, who attends Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton Junior High School in western Minnesota. She said her son offered no reason for sitting.Brandt told the Fargo Forum that Thursday’s one-day in-school suspension,
was kind of dumb because I didn’t do anything wrong. It should be the people’s choice.Kim Dahl said the
punishment didn’t fit the crime. If they wanted to know why he didn’t stand, they should’ve made him write a paper.
I understand the desire to try to protect your son from abuse in a case that’s sure to draw the howling attention of the Patriotic Correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade. But, in all honesty, what would it matter if he were being defiant against America
? Everyone’s got the right their convictions and nobody should be forced to participate in theo-nationalist rituals that violate their conscience. I also understand the desire to try to get a lighter punishment for your kid when the school is so clearly throwing its weight around in an attempt to bully and intimidate through a heavy punishment. But, in all honesty, what possible justification could there be for forcing this kid to take on extra academic work or to explain himself any further than he cares to do so freely?
She said that Brandt has not been standing all year, and
all of a sudden it became an in-school suspension.The district today is defending the punishments. The school’s handbook says all students are required to stand but are not obligated to recite the pledge. The same is true for all four schools in the district, a school official said.
These three [students] didn’t, and they got caught,said Mel Olson, the district’s community education director. He said he backs the punishment,being a veteran and a United States of America citizen, absolutely.Olson served in the Marines in Japan during the Vietnam War.
Another thin-skinned Veteran Against Individual Freedom, I guess, who has nothing better to do with his time than rant and cry about how nobody gives the military and its obsessive flag protocol the respect
they allegedly deserve.
One of the things that makes me happy to see is that there is vigorous debate in the comments section on this story, with many posts from people who condemn the school’s actions (and the very idea of forcing children to recite a pledge of loyalty to the federal government on a daily basis), with reasonable argument and also, at times, with the ridicule and withering sarcasm that this asinine school administration deserves. The only thing there that’s irritating is the number of people who feel compelled to say things like, Oh, I think that everybody ought to jump up and shout
Whatever your personal views about flag protocol may be, this is an argument that can and should be made without doffing your hat to Patriotic Correctness.Sir, yes Sir!
when it comes time to say the Pledge, but I’m not sure that it’s really right to force people….
As for the commenters who have posted in defense of the school’s actions, they’ve offered three different sorts of arguments, each one of which is beneath contempt. In order of increasing outrageousness, here are some examples of each.
First, there’s the standard Patriotic Correctness argument, along with several direct invocations of love it or leave it,
some bizarre non sequiturs about caring about the Constitution (which is nowhere mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance, has nothing to say about the Pledge or about flag protocol, and seems to mean absolutely nothing in the mouths of the people citing it except as a synecdoche for the authority of the United States federal government), and the usual long litany of demands for unearned respect in return for unasked-for services.
The idea here is that the kids ought to be punished for daring to hold, or at least to express, anything other than glassy-eyed unquestioning loyalty to the federal government of the United States of America:
Out of respect for our country..
Its really not that hard to stand up and show some respect- not merely for the flag, but for the values that the flag represents: liberty, justice, and truth. Yes, this is a free country, but that also means that these families are free to leave if they cannot respect our nation.
—olin157 @ 9 May 2008, 10:07 AM
And:
Snot Nosed Brats
These snot nosed brats should not only stand but they should gladly participate in the pledge. At a minimum they should obey the rules of the school which means get off you rear and stand. You don’t have to harm your little sensibilities by actually pledging allegiance to the only country you have, just stand up for goodness sake. The school was right, ACLU and these punks are legally wrong.
—seanintucson @ 9 May 2008, 12:21 PM
Not to mention:
Idol Worship?
Are you people serious? It has nothing to do with the sort. You are not
idolizinganything by standing up during the pledge. Hey, you don’t have to say it, the all powerful Supreme Court has brought thatcommandmentdown, if you will. Have we forgotten so soon what theStandardrepresents? Have youBaby-Boomersforgotten your parents who fought to raise that same flag during WWII? How about the current generation, your grandparents fought for it in WWII or Korea, parents in Vietnam and your friends now in Iraq and Afghanistan. I AM a current soldier, not retired, and HAVE served two tours in Baghdad. I truly believe you have the right to free speech, which is why you can go ahead and not say the pledge, but for the sake of my brethren who have fallen and those in the past who have died, show THEM the respect they deserve. Parents, you need to be teaching that this country isn’t about the government, but the people, and the people who formed it. This country’s freedom has, and is, constantly being paid for with the lives of its fighting men and women. While you may have the luxury of sitting back and saying its a free speech thing, just remember who gave you that same free speech.—SGT_M on May. 9, 08 at 12:26 PM
I should pause to note that my father was indeed in the Army in Vietnam, and my father’s father was in the Army in Korea. The claim that either my father, or my father’s father, fought for free speech, or this country’s freedom,
is absurd. Neither the North Korean government nor the North Vietnamese government, let alone the occupied countries of South Korea and South Vietnam, ever posed any threat to free speech or freedom in the United States of America. They did nothing in the Army to give me free speech
because freedom of speech in the U.S. was not at risk in the first place.
The claim that either my father or my grandfather fought to raise a damned flag on the other side of the world is also absurd. The reason that my father and his father were in the Army is because the federal government sent each of them a letter announcing that if he did not join the Army, he would be arrested and thrown in prison. I’ll be damned if I sit around and listen to some sanctimonious volunteer soldier talk about how the United States Army, which conscripted both my father and my grandfather against their will, deserves my respect
and gratitude for guarding individual freedom during the wars on Korea and Vietnam
As for the statement Parents, you need to be teaching that this country isn’t about the government, but the people, and the people who formed it,
I’m inclined to agree, but I think the upshot is not quite what SGT_M
takes the upshot to be. And I certainly don’t know what any of it has to do with standing during the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge of Allegiance is not about the country,
much less about the people;
it’s about loyalty to the government, and it says so right at the beginning:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
And to the republic, for which it stands.
Anyway.
For the second argument, there’s the These snot-nosed punks got no respect
line. This is, honestly, even worse than the belligerent appeals to American theo-nationalism, because, as disgusting as the latter is, the former involves singling out harmless kids for sneering speculation on their motivations and character. And also because they are is no longer attacking a difference of view and an exercise of liberty because they think something more important (love of the government and its symbols, or whatever) overrides it, but rather attacking difference and liberty just as such, because these teenagers are acting like free human beings instead of doing as they’re told by the wise and powerful authorities. Thus:
Respect!
Even if you do not like the Pledge of Allegiance for what ever reason. You should respect others who care and stand! The lack of respect is the main part of our trouble in this rough times.
—hussman02 @ 9 May 2008 10:05AM
And:
If it’s a school rule and he
doesn’t have an answeras to why he didn’t stand - then he clearly is just being obstinate. I can’t believe a parent would support their kid in this situation!!!—Cartert1 @ 9 May 2008, 9:55 AM
And:
$10 says these are pain-in-the-rear kids with pain-in-the-rear parents that hover around their kids and never make any acknowledgment that their kids could ever do anything wrong. If these kids were formally and legitimately protesting the United States they should not have been punished, but the tenor of the article suggests they are just smart asses and that they did not have any political/personal convictions when they sat out the pledge.
—pipress1487 @ 9 May 2008, 10:23 AM
I don’t think that Brandt Dahl’s statement that I didn’t do anything wrong. It should be the people’s choice.
suggests they are just smart asses
without any political/personal convictions.
But suppose this were true. Then so what? Freedom of speech and expression don’t depend on you having something to say that fits some highly stylized model of formal and legitimate protest.
The chief value of freedom of association just is being able to be a lazy smart-ass and live your ordinary life as you see fit, rather than spending your time protesting and fighting an overbearing, invasive government. While the right to speak out against injustices is vitally important, what’s even more important, and in fact what makes the right to speak out against injustices as vitally important as it is, is the right to just be left the hell alone and not be subjected to the officious demands of busybodies and blowhards on your time and energy.
If these kids are just trying to be pains in the ass over a ritual that they find stupid and tiresome, I support them and salute them. I can think of no better reason to refuse to participate.
The third, and worst, of the arguments seems (surprisingly, for me, anyway) to be the most common: the idea that even if the school policy is unjustified, and even if schools oughtn’t force students to stand, and even if the kids have got a legitimate beef with the school board, it does not matter, because they broke The Rules, and you got to punish anybody who steps out of line, even if they had a perfectly good reason to object. Now it’s no longer a matter of attacking them for having the wrong beliefs about public political devotion, and no longer a matter of attacking them for being thoughtless or not following orders that the authorities had good reason to hand down. It’s a matter of attacking them for not subordinating their own considered judgment and obeying orders which are admittedly arbitrary and perhaps even wrong in themselves. (If you have some free time and a high tolerance for pain, feel free to count the number of times that people repeat, verbatim, the phrase rules are rules.
)
Thus:
he wasn’t protesting.
he didn’t have a reason why he didn’t stand, he just didn’t want to! what happens when mom and dad have house rules that he doesn’t want to follow? should they force him to follow their rules? life is full of rules that different people think are pointless, it just depends on whose ox is being gored. so now he’s learning that he doesn’t really need reasons for his actions, just whether he wants to do it or not. and we wonder why our youth have become so complacent today!
—K_Zemlicka @ 9 May 2008, 10:37 AM
And (all-caps is from the original):
RULES ARE MEANT TO BE FOLLOWED!
RULES ARE RULES, FOLLOWED THEM OR YOU’LL DEAL WITH CONSEQUENCES. BOTTOM LINE ! THAT CHILD DESERVED IT, I BETCHA HE’LL STAND NEXT TIME.
—securpo on 9 May 2008, 10:43 AM
Of course, there are two kinds of consequences
in this world. There are the natural consequences of an action, and then there are the artificial consequences that people attach to an action by their chosen responses. In this case the only natural consequence of not standing for the Pledge is getting to spend a minute longer sitting rather than standing. The consequences
that these three teenagers are being forced to deal with
are better described as the choice of school administrators to flip out and try to make teenagers suffer in the name of Old Glory. In any case, statist logic aside, the fact that school administrators flip out when you don’t obey this stupid policy can hardly be used as a justification for their flipping out, without making your argument do doughnuts around the parking lot.
And then there’s this:
I find it interesting that the school has a policy that students must stand during the Pledge. But, policy is policy and rules are rules, so I agree that the students should be punished. I do think it’s an anti-patriotic policy though and standing for the Pledge would be made more meaningful if kids are allowed to do it through free will.
—ttepley @ 9 May 2008, 10:28 AM
In other words, God forbid that anyone should sit down when there are rules to be followed. Students should be punished for refusing to co-operate with a policy which you yourself believe to be foolish and wrong, because rules and authority need no rational justification, and indeed can defy any rational justification, and they ought to be obeyed nevertheless.
And then there’s this:
My son wasn’t being defiant against America
YetMy son wasn’t being defiant against America,said Kim Dahl, mother of one of the students, Brandt, who attends Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton Junior High School in western Minnesota.The school’s handbook says all students are required to stand but are not obligated to recite the pledge.So her son wasn’t being defiant against America, but defiant to the school policy itself. Ignorance is not a justifiable defense.—pizann0 9 May 2008, 12:12 PM
I can’t stand flag creeps. I think that kind of belligerent theo-nationalism is absurd, contemptible, and dangerous. But what’s even worse than those who believe that every individual conscience should be turned towards a servile worship of the State, are those who believe that whatever your individual conscience is turned towards, you damn well ought to ignore it and follow the rules, because being defiant
to authority is itself a mortal sin, whatever that authority may be and however pointless or wrong may be the rules
that they are trying to impose. Where the complaint is not that they ought to be worshipping the one true God, but rather that they had damn well better bow down, no matter what may be before them at the altar.
Incidentally, the state ACLU says that punishing these students is against the rules, as set out in the U.S. Constitution and in rulings by the Supreme Court. I don’t care, and neither should anybody else.
Some of the Right Things
from Thomas @ Feministe 09 May 2008 11:20 amThe subtitle of this blog is “in defense of the sanctimonious women’s studies set.” Some folks will recall where that title came from: when the best-known Democratic blogger in America loudly dismissed feminism as some special interest interfering with Team Blue’s entitlement to win elections. And that’s not an isolated problem. As the inimitable Melissa McEwan pointed out at Shakesville recently, and even more recently because some people needed clarification, there are a lot of fauxgressive guys in the blogosphere who belittle and snicker at women and marginalize issues that “only” concern women (roughly half the population).
(The primary season has been evidence, if more was needed, of that. See Zuzu’s posts here and here. And I say that as someone who never intended to, and did not, vote for Clinton.)
So it’s good that some of the “big” political bloggers say some of the right things. I won’t attempt an exhaustive list, but I’ve been particularly impressed with Atrios, of Eschaton, who is Duncan Black. I read him for the econ - he has that PhD and all - but it always raises my spirits to see him say explicitly feminist things.
For example, when Judge Deni in Philadelphia called the armed rape of a sex worker theft of services, Zuzu covered it. Atrios picked it up right away, and gave the judge the “Wanker of the Day” headline.
And then, when the now-famous Charlotte Allen self-hating misogyny appeared in the Washington Post, Atrios personally called out the editor, John Pomfret, naming Pomfret the “Wanker of the Day” and quoting some of Allen’s other disgraceful remarks to highlight Pomfret’s insipid excuse that Allen’s work was satire.
Then, he answered the question, “Why Don’t Women Read the Post?” He said, “Today I could read opinion pieces from David Broder, Robert Novak, David Ignatius, Robert Joseph and J.D. Crouch II, and Tim Westrich. It’s truly a mystery.”
And most recently, this.
Now, that stuff is good, but he recently said something which required actual insight, and one not common among het guys:
“I’m reminded of my college days, when rape awareness education for women was all the rage. It started off in a sensible place, but it also gave women a list of “risky behaviors” which made them feel responsible for their own rape if they actually did crazy things like walk out alone at night.”
I’m not claiming perfection for him, of course, and I’m sure he’s said some things that would make us shake our heads or even our fists in the past. But that last part has the sound, to my ears, of someone who listens to the women in his life when they tell him what it’s like.
Self-censorship
from Rad Geek @ Rad Geek People's Daily 08 May 2008 6:48 pm(Via feministe 2008-05-05.)
From a long post by PortlyDyke at Shakesville on the closet and PDAs (I mean Public Displays of Affection, not Private Defense Associations):
When ABC news did their second social experiment about Public Displays of Affection (PDAs) by having a gay male couple and a lesbian couple kiss and cuddle in public (the first experiment used straight couples), the reactions were varied.
There was the woman who called the cops:
Operator:
Birmingham Police operator 9283Caller:
We have a couple of men sitting out on the bench that have been kissing and drooling all over each other for the past hour or so. It’s not against the law, right?Operator:
Not to the best of my knowledge it’s not.Caller:
So there’s no complaint I could make or have?Operator:
I imagine you could complain if you like ma’am. We can always send an officer down there.And they did … . The officer told our couple that the police dispatch received a call because the two of them were making out.
Just don’t do that in public,he told them before leaving the scene.There was the woman who said:
I would actually want our kids to grow up in a place where they would see various types of people engaging in behaviors that [are] loving.And then there were the people who took a whole different
think of teh childrenz!tack:
I don’t really find it inappropriate, especially during the day when schoolchildren aren’t running around. They might get confused and want an answer for what’s going on,bystander Mary-Kate told us. The majority of the people who spoke about children seemed to echo Mary-Kate’s feelings.Which means, basically, these folks are fine with
Gay PDA— as long as they don’t have to face the uncomfortable, icky business of explaining to their children that not everybody on earth is like mommy and daddy.[…]
I doubt that most straight, cisgendered people think about, or notice, how frequently they touch their partner in public in ways that are not necessarily
sexual(in addition to kissing, cuddling, and the odd bum-squeeze) — ie. holding hands, walking with an arm around the waist, smoothing the other’s hair back out of their eyes — nor do I think that most straight, cisgendered people are probably aware of the fact that when I touch my partner in public, it’s nearly always a considered act.I don’t obsess about this — as in — it doesn’t eat up my days and nights — and I’m probably about as
outas a queer can be in this country — but every single time I take my partner’s hand on the street, or toss my arm over her shoulder or around her waist, hug her goodbye or hello, I do a little, tinysecurity sweep.[…]
This friend is the sister I never had. I loved her (and love her still) dearly, and her inability to see how the Measure 8 (which was passed that year) was likely to affect me and my family was incredibly painful to me. I remember weeping in her living room as I tried to explain something that was, to her, completely invisible. I talked to her about how scary it had been to come out publicly after having led a fairly comfortable life as a closeted queer, and she just didn’t seem to get why it should be a big deal at all.
So, I issued her and her husband a challenge (and I’ll issue the same challenge to any straight coupled allies here who want to raise their awareness of LBGTQ issues):
Spend an entire week pretending that you’re not a couple. Don’t write a check from a joint bank account. Hide all the photographs in your home and office which would identify you as a couple. Take off your wedding rings. Touch each other, and talk to each other, in public, in ways that could only be interpreted as you being
friends. Refer to yourself only in the singularI, never in thewe. When you go to work on Monday, if you spent time together on the weekend, include only information which would indicate that you went somewhere with a friend, rather than your life-mate. If someone comes to stay with you, sleep in separate beds. Go intentionally into the closet as a couple. For a week.They took my challenge.
They lasted exactly three days.
My friend returned to me in tears on day four and said:
I’m sorry. I had no idea what it is like for you.—PortlyDyke @ Shakesville (2008-04-29): Take My Arm, My Love
Read the whole thing. It’s a simple point, but it’s important, and powerful, and beautiful.