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5 minutes ago, Brad said:

Are you saying in your second to last sentence that you cease to be military when you leave the service? I’ve had more than one ex-Marine day to me that you’re a Marine for life; I once referred to a Marine no longer with the Marines as a “former Marine.” I was quickly corrected. If servicemen and women who are no longer part of the service still consider themselves as such, that means the mindset doesn’t really end either. 

That's why the "mindset" matters.

I think a lot of people, in and out of the military, saw what was going on in the aftermath of our post-9/11 actions and decided that it was not healthy for anybody. But a lot is not everybody.

To not go past that, though, can we all agree that broken people should be helped, or at least not be encouraged and enabled to break others? Just as a general principle, cops, military, civilians, felons, CEOs, just anybody.

Facilitating that is, to me, what "protect and serve" is all about above anything else. Police, military, clergy, community activist, dairy farmer, record collector, hermit, anybody.

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Brad -- I'm not denying what your ex-Marine said. I'm saying that an ex-Marine who then joins the police isn't automatically inclined to dispense of brute force. Rather, given what I said above, iit seems more likely to me that a well-trained military man, upon exiting the military, will retain a good deal of the training and sense of discipline that was part of his military experience and know better than most how to act judiciously under stress,. Your assumption, if that's what you're assuming, that an ex-Marine would be prone to violence if and when he becomes a member of a police force is an insult to the Marines.

 

OTOH, I have a cousin who was a military policeman in the Korean War and who later became a Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff because, as he told me, he liked to beat up Mexicans. Bit then he was a complete asshole.

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Here is a new and informative video piece about the Bible “photo-op” and preceding events - from the Washington Post (via their official YouTube channel).

Much of the video footage is sourced from various official cable TV news and local (live) broadcast TV news teams (multiple stations).

FYI, I saw the events live as they unfolded on the local NBC affiliate’s coverage with 2-3 local reporters on-scene (each with their own camera crew). Much of their local coverage was interspersed with the  “Official” pool newsfeed from the White House (single camera, no audio).

It all seemed pretty harrowing in real-time, over about 15-20 minutes.

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57 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

Brad -- I'm not denying what your ex-Marine said. I'm saying that an ex-Marine who then joins the police isn't automatically inclined to dispense of brute force. Rather, given what I said above, it seems more likely to me that a well-trained military man, upon exiting the military, will retain a good deal of the training and sense of discipline that was part of his military experience and know better than most how to act judiciously under stress,. Your assumption, if that's what you're assuming, that an ex-Marine would be prone to violence if and when he becomes a member of a police force is an insult to the Marines.

Agree

How is saying he/she is a Marine for life any different then people being loyal to their alma mater?

 

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25 minutes ago, Rooster_Ties said:

Here is a new and informative video piece about the Bible “photo-op” and preceding events - from the Washington Post (via their official YouTube channel).

Much of the video footage is sourced from various official cable TV news and local (live) broadcast TV news teams (multiple stations).

FYI, I saw the events live as they unfolded on the local NBC affiliate’s coverage with 2-3 local reporters on-scene (each with their own camera crew). Much of their local coverage was interspersed with the  “Official” pool newsfeed from the White House (single camera, no audio).

It all seemed pretty harrowing in real-time, over about 15-20 minutes.

The bible should have burst into flames.

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Speaking of Marines:

U.S Marine veteran stages three-hour BLM protest in Utah heat

Also, I don’t think anybody was out to denigrate Marines or suggest that ex-military should not serve in law enforcement. More that ex-military may come with their own particular forms of baggage that contribute to the problematic police culture in this country. 

48 minutes ago, jlhoots said:

The bible should have burst into flames.

Wasn’t he holding it upside down, too? Somehow that *does* seem appropriate... though bursting into flames would have been divine poetic justice for sure.

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8 minutes ago, ghost of miles said:

Speaking of Marines:

U.S Marine veteran stages three-hour BLM protest in Utah heat

Also, I don’t think anybody was out to denigrate Marines or suggest that ex-military should not serve in law enforcement. More that ex-military may come with their own particular forms of baggage that contribute to the problematic police culture in this country. 

 

My point again was that if a military vet joins the police force,  habits of discipline and training might well be among the "baggage"  he bring to the job, rather than a penchant for violence, as some seem to think.

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1 hour ago, catesta said:

How is saying he/she is a Marine for life any different then people being loyal to their alma mater?

now see, that's the shit I could never even begin to understand. You went to a school, you were a kid, and somebody paid them. You left with, maybe, a degree, and maybe, an education.

For that you're supposed to pull for their football team for the rest of your fucking life?

I don't think so.

I can certainly see feeling allegiance to individuals, or even to programs, and gratitude for opportunities, I certainly get., but all this wearing school colors and logos and mascots and shit, hey, that's for chumps. Wear your own damn colors, man.

 

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9 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

My point again was that if a military vet joins the police force,  habits of discipline and training might well be among the "baggage"  he bring to the job...

They should hire great jazz musicians to be cops then. They will have more than enough habits of discipline and training to do any damn job that's worth doing.

 

ok, all this trump/biible/hairproduct talk, back between the lines, please. To borrow a phrase, that's not why we're here.

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15 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

My point again was that if a military vet joins the police force,  habits of discipline and training might well be among the "baggage"  he bring to the job, rather than a penchant for violence, as some seem to think.

Not so much a penchant for violence, but intensive training to fight in combat is perhaps not the best background for policing, which is, or should be, anyway, a very different kind of duty.  (Unfortunately, U.S. police culture has become overly militarized in recent decades, which is part of the problem we're now facing.)  And if one is a "Marine for life," as has been said in this thread, then I'm not sure how one so easily changes that kind of vocational orientation.  Again, not saying that ex-soldiers should be banned or discouraged from serving as police officers; but the blurring of military and law enforcement is possibly indirectly exacerbated if a particular department or force has a large number of ex-military, or a militaristic mindset to begin with.  As somebody in a social-media discussion I'm following said, the notion should be not to "defund the police", but to "demilitarize the police."  

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17 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

Brad -- I'm not denying what your ex-Marine said. I'm saying that an ex-Marine who then joins the police isn't automatically inclined to dispense of brute force. Rather, given what I said above, iit seems more likely to me that a well-trained military man, upon exiting the military, will retain a good deal of the training and sense of discipline that was part of his military experience and know better than most how to act judiciously under stress,. Your assumption, if that's what you're assuming, that an ex-Marine would be prone to violence if and when he becomes a member of a police force is an insult to the Marines.

 

OTOH, I have a cousin who was a military policeman in the Korean War and who later became a Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff because, as he told me, he liked to beat up Mexicans. Bit then he was a complete asshole.

Larry, I was asking what your point was. I was not making any commentary on propensity to violence. What each Marine probably has in common with the others is the experience of being a Marine and their esprit du corps. 

17 hours ago, catesta said:

How is saying he/she is a Marine for life any different then people being loyal to their alma mater?

 I’ve never been in the Armed Forces but I think it’s quite different. It’s shared experiences, possibly in war. If you’ve seen the Band of Brothers (and I have multiple times), particularly the last episode, that’s what I mean.

Apologies if I took the conversation far afield. 

Edited by Brad
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Yes, what we need is more military members in the police because they have been so well trained and disciplined

 

 

EDIT -- Photos of American military men/women proudly serving their country in Abu Ghraib prison have been removed from this post by the moderator.  No argument from me.  Just so folks know he what he is referring to in the post below.  Hopefully some of those images from the recent past are still seared into our collective national soul.

 

 

 

 

Edited by duaneiac
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Taking those photos out because there's no place for porn on this board. Death porn, S&M Porn, or any kind of porn.

But yes, that's what we were doing to our people back then, sending them off, turning them loose, andthen faking horror while also giving implicit approval. A lot of them have come home broken as a result. And as an institutional society, we still don't seem to give too much a halfagoddamn about too much of it.

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Josh Marshall actually just now published a post at TPM that addresses this very topic.  You have to be a paid subscriber to read all of it, but here is a pertinent passage:

>>

Police abuse of minority communities in the United States is a story stretching back decades and centuries. The militarization of American policing is a much more recent phenomenon though the two phenomena have overlapped and compounded each other. Much of this debate over militarization has focused on the Pentagon’s 1033 Program which charges the Secretary of Defense with donating surplus military hardware to the nation’s thousands of police departments. (The photo above is of an MRAP, a vehicle designed to withstand IEDs and guerrilla ambushes. Numerous US police departments have them.) But there is another dimension of the story that has only partly made its way into the national conversation about policing and violence. The United States has been in a constant state of war since the end of 2001 and in many ways since the Gulf Crisis of 1990. Through numerous channels this has led to a broad militarization of life in the United States. Policing and military hardware is only the most obvious manifestation.

The 1033 program begins with the Defense Authorization Act of 1990 and first focused on counter-narcotics. The program was further expanded in 1997 for “use in counternarcotics and counterterrorism operations, and to enhance officer safety.” 9/11 and the Iraq War led to still further expansions and a new generation of hardware designed for urban combat and counter-insurgency operations.

In the nature of things access to military hardware primes people to act in militarized ways and to see their work in militarized terms. But hardware is only one part of the equation. Two decades of being at war – which again really stretches back to 1990 – has created a steady stream of military veterans who go into law enforcement. This means people who are trained in military actions and in many cases people who carry the psychological baggage of PTSD. One study of the Dallas Police Department found that officers with military backgrounds were significantly more likely to have fired their firearms in the line of duty than those who hadn’t.

The point here isn’t to create a stereotype of trigger-happy vets bringing the trauma of their service onto American streets. There are other examples of police vets who say their training has helped them deescalate situations. But these experiences are shaping even if they are not traumatic per se. The more or less constant deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of it in urban environments, has certainly had a deep imprint on the policing cultures which have followed many of those veterans into American police departments.

To pick just one example, Josh Kovensky has been reporting on this incident in the clearing of Lafayette Park a week ago in which at least one National Guard helicopter flew low over crowds inundating them with the rotor downwash, an established crowd control measure used in military situations to overawe demonstrators. The Pentagon is investigating who gave the order to use this tactic and the identity of the pilots is unknown. But given the near constant deployment of National Guard troops to Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two decades and the highly specialized training for helicopter pilots it seems quite possible that whoever the pilot was had experience with the tactic from overseas. Indeed, it is almost a certainty that whoever trained that pilot had such experience.

It is a constant theme of much of the 20th century literature on colonialism that the tactics and strategies great powers use on their peripheries are often brought back and used at home. The militarization of American policing is unquestionably highly driven by this dynamic. The flow of weapons is only the most concrete and literal manifestation. But even hardware and personnel are only one part of the equation.<<

Militarized policing and bringing the war home

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I don't see anybody being happy about what they're doing in those pictures, nor do I see them being taken for those who would derive pleasure from seeing them. I mean, if you do, you're a sick fuck, period. But I see nothing in either intent nor content indicating that these pictures were taken by or for sick fucks.

But really, is it really that complicated?

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I guess it is complicated.  One photo above includes a fully nude underage girl, which would certainly qualify as "porn" in many quarters. 

How about this photo? 

ap862800471107.jpg

"Porn" or "history"?  I'll bet the person taking the photo was probably delighted by the brutal killing of Mussolini and his mistress among others.  Does the possibility that the photographer might have derived a sense of pleasure from seeing this horrendous sight automatically make it "death porn"?  Should any Italian (or any European or American) who derived a sense of pleasure in 1945 from seeing the mutilated corpse of Mussolini strung up like a side of beef be considered a "sick fuck"?

History is frequently unpleasant to look at and the photographic records we have of recent history can be deeply troubling but very informative.  It's a mistake to gloss over the most unpleasant records in our history.

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18 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

Lem Winchester was a cop.

I used to work with a singer who was also an NYPD LT. He told me that during the 60's civil rights riots in Harlem, they used to take pot shots at black people on the roof of their tenement buildings. His son became a cop, and he blew some guy away on the first day on the job. They transferred him to the FDNY the next day.

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