Author Topic: Do you think we are moving closer to a police state?  (Read 590 times)

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rangerrebew

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Do you think we are moving closer to a police state?
« on: January 28, 2014, 06:40:49 pm »
Forum: Do You Feel We Are Moving Closer To A Police State?


January 28, 2014
By Joshua Pundit

Huh

Every week on Monday morning , the Council and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher’s Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week’s question:

GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD: Whoa! What a question!!

If you haven’t been on the rec’ving end of coppers gone mad with their own power – YaY! for you!!
 Because once you have – you see how scary things are going. As Sir Paul (or maybe it was Spongebob or the O”Reilly Factor cat) once LOL’d - “A nation of sheep has a government of wolves”

The reality of our age is this: if the government chooses to crash through our doors, listen to our phone calls, read our emails and text messages, fine us for growing vegetables in our front yard, jail us for raising chickens in our backyard, forcibly take our blood and saliva, seize and search us, there’s little we can do to stop them. At least, not at that particular moment. When you’re face to face with a government agent who is not only armed to the hilt and inclined to shoot first and ask questions later but also woefully ignorant of the fact that he works for you, if you value your life, you don’t talk back.

It used to be that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which enshrines the rights to free speech, free press, assembly, religious exercise and petitioning one’s government for a redress of grievances, was considered the most critical of the amendments in the Bill of Rights.

The right to speak freely doesn’t help you when your home is being invaded by a SWAT team or the government is spying on your emails and phone calls, and tracking your whereabouts. It certainly doesn’t help you when you’re in the back of a police cruiser or face-to-face with a cop hyped up on the power of his badge. In fact, exercising your right to free speech in such scenarios today, even nominally, will more than likely get you pepper sprayed, tasered, shot or at the very least charged with resisting arrest or disorderly conduct.

No, see, it’s the Fourth Amendment, which demands that we be “secure” in our persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government and, consequently, stands as a bulwark against the police state, is, in fact, the most critical.

Unfortunately,get so focused on the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant before government agents can invade our property (a requirement that means little in an age of kangaroo courts and rubberstamped warrant requests) that we fail to properly appreciate the first part of the statement declaring that we have a right to be secure in our “persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

What this means is that the Fourth Amendment’s protections were intended to not only follow us wherever we go but also apply to all that is ours—whether you’re talking about our physical bodies, our biometric data, our possessions, our families, or our way of life.

However, in an 8-1 ruling in Kentucky v. King (2011), the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned SWAT teams smashing down doors of homes or apartments without a warrant if they happen to “suspect” you might be doing something illegal in your home.

Illegal, invasive spying on Americans. There is no form of digital communication that the government cannot and does not monitor—phone calls, emails, text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, internet video chats, etc., are allaccessible, trackable and downloadable by federal agents. In other words, there is nothing private from the government, which has used a variety of covert, unconstitutional tactics to gain access to Americans’ personal data, online purchases and banking, medical records, and online communications. The government’s methods include the use of supercomputers to hack through privacy settings, collaborations with corporations to create “back doors” for government access into encrypted files, and the use of strong-arm tactics against those technology and internet companies who refuse to cooperate. It is estimated that the National Security Agency has intercepted 15 to 20 trillion communications of American citizens since 9/11.

Police shootings of unarmed citizens. No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. This trend originates from a police preoccupation with ensuring their own safety at all costs, with tragic consequences for the innocent civilians unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, consider the 16-year-old teenager who skipped school only to be shot by police after they mistook him for a fleeing burglar.

SWAT team raids. On an average day in America, at least 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams (although estimates as high as 300 a day), which are increasingly used to deal with routine police matters: angry dogs, domestic disputes, search warrants, etc. Unfortunately, general incompetence (officers misread the address on the warrant), collateral damage (fatalities, property damage, etc.) and botched raids (officers barge into the wrong house or even the wrong building) tend to go hand in hand with this overuse of SWAT teams, with tragic consequences for the homeowner who mistakes a SWAT raid for a home invasion, such as the 107-year-old Arkansas man killed after a “shootout” with a SWAT team or the 19-year-old Seattle woman who was accidentally shot in the leg by police after she refused to show her hands.

Arresting Americans for altogether legal activities such as picking their kids up from school, holding Bible studies at home, and selling goat cheese. Unfortunately, our government’s tendency towards militarization and overcriminalization, in which routine, everyday behaviors become targets of regulation and prohibition, have resulted in Americans getting arrested for making and selling unpasteurized goat cheese, cultivating certain types of orchids, feeding a whale, holding Bible studies in their homes, and picking their kids up from school. This last incident actually happened in Tennessee, when Jim Howe, a father of two elementary school-aged kids, was arrested and jailed after insisting on walking his son home as soon as school let out rather than waiting 35 minutes for carpoolers to get their kids first.

Jailing Americans for profit. At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, as states attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private corporations, imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business, with states agreeing to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in privately run prisons for at least 20 years. And how do you keep the prisons full? By passing laws aimed at increasing the prison population, including the imposition of life sentences on people who commit minor or nonviolent crimes such as siphoning gasoline.

Transforming the schools into  quasi-prisons and teaching young people that they have no rights. Zero tolerance policies which criminalize childish behavior continue to destroy the lives of young people such as the 14-year-old arrested for texting in class; the 6-year-olds suspended for using their fingers as imaginary guns in a schoolyard game of cops and robbers; the 12-year-old hauled out of school in handcuffs for doodling on her desk with an erasable marker; or the 17-year-old charged with a felony for keeping his tackle box in his car parked on school property, potentially derailing his chances of entering the Air Force.


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http://www.independentsentinel.com/forum-do-you-feel-we-are-moving-closer-to-a-police-state/
« Last Edit: January 28, 2014, 06:43:55 pm by rangerrebew »

Oceander

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Re: Do you think we are moving closer to a police state?
« Reply #1 on: January 28, 2014, 07:12:31 pm »
Quote
If you haven’t been on the rec’ving end of coppers gone mad with their own power – YaY! for you!!
 Because once you have – you see how scary things are going. As Sir Paul (or maybe it was Spongebob or the O”Reilly Factor cat) once LOL’d - “A nation of sheep has a government of wolves”

Truer words were ne'er spoken.  Law & Order types generally don't stay that way once they've been on the receiving end of some law & order.

While abuse of power by cops and other agents of the government is a problem as old as government itself, it appears to have become significantly worse since 9/11, and I believe that much of this can be attributed to people who responded to 9/11 by becoming "defenders" of the US.  Many of those people are in earnest, but they see the world in binary, black and white terms, and they are on a personal mission to protect "us" from "them."  The problem is, who "us" are and who "them" are is a very subjective determination made by each of these individuals on their own basis, according to their own beliefs.  Largely, however, "us" are those people who follow orders, most especially the orders of these "protectors" and who are generally passive; "them" is anyone the "protector" deems a threat - whether that's a reasonable conclusion or not - and in particular that includes anyone whom the "protector" perceives as not following his/her orders.  Furthermore, many of these individuals have a very dangerous view of what's permissible:  they believe that they can "protect" the "us" from the "them" by any means necessary.  That includes trampling on the rights on someone who's become a "them" - again, regardless of whether that conclusion is reasonable or not.  These people really wanted to "get the terrorists" when they started, and went into law enforcement.  But cops and assistant DAs, and the like, generally don't fight terrorists on a regular basis; instead, they deal with the hum drum of normal life in which - given the plethora of laws these days - most of us have broken some law more often than not, and in which wisdom, common sense, and a sense of practicalities is substantially more valuable than a very rigid set of moral principles - many of which are, in fact, immoral (by any means necessary is immoral) - and unfortunately the people who responded to 9/11 by going into law enforcement generally have a very rigid, subjective, sense of morality, in which their role as the morally superior person is never subject to question - one might as well question the existence of gravity as question the moral superiority of one of these people.  And so, they tend to turn on otherwise normal individuals and lash out at them with anger and force that is wholly disproportionate to what those individuals have done and which someone operating under the rule of reason and common sense would never have thought to use.

It is these sorts of people who comprise a police state so yes, I think we're moving closer to a police state, if we aren't in an embryonic one already.

Online Fishrrman

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Re: Do you think we are moving closer to a police state?
« Reply #2 on: January 29, 2014, 04:36:15 am »
[[ Do You Feel We Are Moving Closer To A Police State? ]]

Questions like this are asked, after it's already too late.

Oceander

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Re: Do you think we are moving closer to a police state?
« Reply #3 on: January 29, 2014, 04:39:07 am »
[[ Do You Feel We Are Moving Closer To A Police State? ]]

Questions like this are asked, after it's already too late.

Most questions are usually asked after the answer has become apparent (i.e., when it's already too late).

Offline 240B

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Re: Do you think we are moving closer to a police state?
« Reply #4 on: January 29, 2014, 05:03:39 am »
It is a little late to be asking this now. IMO
You cannot "COEXIST" with people who want to kill you.
If they kill their own with no conscience, there is nothing to stop them from killing you.
Rational fear and anger at vicious murderous Islamic terrorists is the same as irrational antisemitism, according to the Leftists.

rangerrebew

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Re: Do you think we are moving closer to a police state?
« Reply #5 on: January 30, 2014, 01:30:59 pm »
I posted a video of sheeple in Hollyweird giving their comments on the State of the Union speech, BEFORE IT HAPPENED.  Apparently there are at least 51% of the public who fall into that uninformed classification who need to be told they are going to be living in a police state so they will wake up to the reality.  Maybe, just maybe, it isn't too late. :0001:

Offline massadvj

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Re: Do you think we are moving closer to a police state?
« Reply #6 on: January 30, 2014, 02:01:39 pm »
What I notice is the tightening of regulations and restrictions on travel, particularly foreign travel.  One of the characteristics of a totalitarian police state is that it must seal the smartest, most resourceful people in, otherwise the productivity of such people cannot be captured and used to accomplish the objectives of the state.  The USA has quietly put in place the infrastructure necessary to accomplish this, and that is what alarms me the most.