https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viuR7N6E2LA
Like we're zoo animals being monitored
Showing posts with label police state. Show all posts
Showing posts with label police state. Show all posts
Friday, May 08, 2020
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Monday, April 13, 2020
Friday, April 10, 2020
Thursday, April 09, 2020
Saturday, April 04, 2020
Monday, March 30, 2020
Crackdown on churches and synogogues
Tampa megachurch pastor Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne was arrested for holding voluntary services and "faces a punishment of up to 60 days in jail and fines totaling up to $500." This raises an important church-state concern, as does New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's outrageous threat "to permanently close churches and synagogues [mosques?] that hold services during the coronavirus pandemic." He doesn't have the constitutional authority to "permanently close" any church, though he apparently thinks he does.
Getting an abortion is an "essential" service according to Democrat-governed areas (and the wicked NYT). In many places keeping liquor stores open is also an "essential" service. We go to grocery stories in close contact with tens or hundreds of people. If you don't touch your face with unwashed hands, you are very unlikely to get COVID-19, particularly if not standing within 3-6 feet of the same person for 15-30 minutes or more. Many church buildings have enough space to make such a seating arrangement possible.
How long should churches allow the state to close their doors? Are churches not going to meet for Easter celebration? What if the restrictions persist over many months, even over a year? In ancient Israel a disease or plague would have prompted people to hold a national convocation of repentance, not to disperse. Democrats are already inclined to act with impunity against the church, as Beto's remark about removing the tax-exempt status of any church that does not kowtow to the LGBTQ agenda. These recent events will only make matters worse, with long-term ramifications well beyond the time that it takes COVID-19 to run its course.
Sunday, March 29, 2020
Monday, October 21, 2019
DACA
I'm getting propaganda about DACA in my news feed. There are two ways to view DACA: on the merits or from a process standpoint. It's striking how many people think DACA is sacrosanct. But DACA was never enacted into law. It's simply a policy of the Obama administration. Executive policies can always be changed by the next administration. DACA is kepy alive by renegade judges who operate outside the law as members of the Resistance.
Even if you think DACA is a swell idea, so long as it's nothing more than Executive policy, it can be rescinded. If you think a president doesn't have the Constitutional right to revoke Executive policies of former administrations, if you think courts have the right to block the Trump administration from revoking DACA, you support a dictatorship. Our system is based on consent of the governed. We elect officials to represent our interests. If they fail, we can vote them out of office.
To insist that Executive policies have the force of law, which can't be revoked by successive administrations, you don't believe in consent of the governed. The alternative is an unaccountable ruling class.
Suppose a gov't official likes your house, or your car, or your daughter. What's to stop him from seizing whatever he wants for his own benefit? In a representative democracy, the law restrains him. But if secular progressives have their way, everyone will be at the mercy of a banana republic or totalitarian state. Think China, N. Korea, Stalinism, Papa/Baby Doc Duvalier, Robert Mugabe, &c. So many Americans are too stupid to think three steps deep.
Saturday, October 12, 2019
Facial recognition systems
Public service announcement:
Facial recognition systems, combined with omnipresent security cameras, are a tool of the surveillance state. The solution is to become a vampire, since vampires don't cast reflections.
Facial recognition systems, combined with omnipresent security cameras, are a tool of the surveillance state. The solution is to become a vampire, since vampires don't cast reflections.
Tuesday, October 01, 2019
Happy Chinese National Day!
(The very moment a Hong Kong police officer shoots a Hong Kong pro-democracy protester in the chest. You can see the flash in the barrel of the gun. This happened earlier today.)
Today marks the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. The People's Republic of China was officially established on October 1, 1949. National Day is basically China's equivalent to our 4th of July. Independence Day.
Wednesday, August 07, 2019
Monday, August 05, 2019
What happens when you disarm the public
But the real problem lies in the police, that vast body of men and women, largely absent from the streets we pay them to patrol. In the last week, I have not seen one police officer on foot, anywhere, and I have looked out for them.
They have become a closed society, quite Left-wing, pursuing their own politically correct agendas, uninterested in their main job of deterring crime by being present on the streets.
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/07/peter-hitchens-dont-be-duped-by-cheery-boris-johnson-its-your-duty-to-be-glum.html
They have become a closed society, quite Left-wing, pursuing their own politically correct agendas, uninterested in their main job of deterring crime by being present on the streets.
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/07/peter-hitchens-dont-be-duped-by-cheery-boris-johnson-its-your-duty-to-be-glum.html
Thursday, April 18, 2019
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Law enforcement priorities
A journalist has been accused of a hate crime, after she misgendered a trans person on Twitter. Hate crimes have a maximum two-year prison sentence.— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) March 20, 2019
But with knife crimes soaring across the UK, should police be investigating incidents such as these?@SwainITV with more. pic.twitter.com/eyh1NJfT1W
Saturday, February 23, 2019
The seal of confession
That raises a nest issues:
i) It diverts attention away from the source of the problem. It's not Catholic laymen who are the molesters but (many) Catholic priests (and bishops). That's primarily a homosexual crime, and I doubt Catholic laymen are homosexual at higher rates than men generally. So this law has it backwards. The problem isn't laymen confessing child abuse to priests, but abusive priests.
ii) The law is too sweeping since this is primarily a Catholic problem. I don't mean sexual abuse is primarily a Catholic problem, but homosexual abuse of minors.
iii) It would essentially make Catholicism illegal. While I'm opposed to Catholicism, I don't think it should be against the law to be Catholic.
Admittedly, I'm not a religious freedom absolutist. I'm much less tolerant of Islam. But Islam is dangerous in a way that Catholicism is not.
iv) If you accept the principle of the mandated reporter law, why draw the line with suspected child abuse/neglect? Why not require clergy to refer any crime to the authorities which is confided to them?
v) In general, I'm opposed to turning private citizens into domestic spies. It's one thing for a private citizen to voluntarily report a crime, quite another to make private citizens agents of the state who have an obligation, under penalty of law, to be snitches for the government. That's a classic police state mentality which existed in the Soviet Union.
vi) Although this can protect kids in some situations, it can easily be abused. "Suspected" cases reported to authorities. CPS swoops in, removes the kids from their home, then innocent parents have to fight an expensive uphill legal battle to get them back. So it cuts both ways. Consider how this can be weaponized against Jewish or Christian parents by progressive public school employees who disapprove of how parents are raising their kids. Think how it could be extended to the LGBT agenda.
vii) And this invites overreporting to shift the blame. The mandated reporter avoids legal liability for failing to report suspected cases by automatically referring a case to the authorities on the filmiest grounds.
viii) Mind you, I think the seal of confession is fanatical. There are extreme situations in which, even if something is shared in confidence, we have a moral duty to report that to the authorities. But that's an extreme situation, and a moral duty is different from a legal duty. And even in that case, there's such a thing as anonymous tips.
Laws like this can be indexed to anyone who's licensed by the state, which ties into the problem of overregulation. A runaway proliferation of occupations that require licensing.
ix) How can this even enforceable? If a crime is confided in private, there's no record of who said what to whom unless that's written down. The mandated reporter can simply deny that the perp confided in him. Where's the evidence to the contrary?
x) BTW, are lawmakers exempt from mandatory reporter laws?
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Saturday, February 17, 2018
Nikolas Cruz
A few observations, in no particular order, about the Florida school massacre:
i) Guns take lives, guns save lives. News reports are slanted and one-sided because the liberal media gives the former saturation coverage while the latter is underreported. For instance:
ii) I saw a group on Facebook draw invidious comparisons between Japan and the USA. I hesitate to make international comparisons because I know less about other countries, but from what I've read, Japan has its own problems. For instance:
iii) It's instructive that when the story concerns black-on-black crime or jihadist attacks, sociologists rush in to tell us that we need to consider the "root-cause" of violence, which they blame on the "system", racism, colonialism, &c. but when it's a sniper, they blame guns.
iv) The FBI has been blamed for dropping the ball in this case. It had at least two tips, but did nothing of consequence. However, I'm not sure what the FBI should do in cases like this. I'm not a child psychologist, but aren't many teenagers prone to emotional volatility, overreaction, exaggerated feelings? They usually outgrow it, but isn't that a common phase that many adolescent boys and girls go through? Are we going to start rounding up millions of teenagers who are exhibit wild mood swings, erratic behavior, &c.? Should they be institutionalized and medicated with psychotropic drugs?
I'd turn the question around. I think the issue isn't so much whether the FBI should intervene in cases like this, but what is the raison d'être for the FBI? Does that agency do more harm than good? Is it maker us safer, or is it a threat to civil liberties? When you trade civil liberties for security, you lose both.
v) BTW, this is a problem with dragnet surveillance. Our so-called law enforcement agencies have too much information, not too little. When they hoover up information on Americans generally, there's an enormous amount of static to sift through.
vi) There's a curious analogy between advocates of "sensible gun control" and the reaction of atheists to the latest natural disaster. Atheists always act as if when you have a fresh natural disaster that kills hundreds or thousands of people, this should be the tipping-point. When are you going to stop believing in God? What does it take? How much more do you need? But astute Christians already have theodicies for that. A new natural disaster doesn't change anything in that regard. It doesn't add a new kind of evidence we didn't have before.
By the same token, Americans who support the 2nd Amendment have principled reasons for their position. That takes abuse of the 2nd Amendment into account. That's a necessary tradeoff for living in a free and open society. And that's true for civil liberties in general. Should we repeal the 1st Amendment because it's abused?
There is no tipping-point. We expect access to guns will sometimes have tragic results. But that's just one side of the story. I believe Cambodia has about 2 million piles of skulls with bullet holes in the back of the head because the Khmer Rouge disarmed the populace before committing genocide. Then there's Mao's Cultural Revolution. When the state has all the firepower, what's to deter it?
vii) One issue is whether we should seek a general motivation for snipers, or consider the snipers individually.
In some cases, snipers may be motivated by celebrity. They'd rather be infamous than a nobody. Likewise, it gives them a sense of power. The power of life and death.
In some cases this may reflect backlash against feminism and the "war on boys".
In some cases a sniper was bullied, and this is revenge. Moreover, a kid who's bullied dreads going to school, and this puts an end to that prospect. It also reverses the power dynamic by putting them in control.
There's also a vicious cycle where unpopular kids respond to their unpopularity by becoming more morose and withdrawn, which makes them even more shunned, which aggravates their sense of alienation and resentment.
Cruz's adoptive mother, Lynda Cruz, reportedly had trouble with his behavior in the past. She would occasionally contact the police to give him behavioral advice at their home, Helen Pasciolla, a former neighbor, told The New York Times."I think she wanted to scare them a little bit," Pasciolla said. "Nikolas has behavioral problems, I think, but I never thought he would be violent."Lynda Cruz died in November, according to Fort Lauderdale's Sun Sentinel. Her husband died years earlier of a heart attack; Cruz and his brother were in the care of a family friend at the time of the shooting, people close to the family told the Associated Press.
I expect the unstable domestic situation, lack of contact with his biological parents–especially his real father–may be the source of his rage.
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