The more you read about the details of Elijah McClain's murder, the more unsettling it really is, both in the crime itself, and the larger picture entailed by it. I had no idea that ketamine was being used so routinely to incapacitate civilians detained by law enforcement.
Here's a couple things I do know, just to pick a couple of random, if notorious examples:
It sure is funny how these people, who have military-grade weapons and armor and training, and are given broad powers of discretion in urgent situations (most importantly, determining whether a situation in even "urgent" in the first place), somehow manage to defuse situations where there's already a pile of bodies. Yet they're pretty good at going full-throttle tough-guy when there's a scared 140-pound kid walking home with a sack of groceries.
Really keeping the mean streets of Aurora safe for humanity, you guys. Be proud of yourselves. Take a photo at your trophy site.
Keep in mind that McClain was actually killed nearly a year ago. The only reason you're finally hearing about it is because of the more recent murders and assaults that have received more notoriety and scrutiny.
So cut to a few days ago, when z group of citizens decided to exercise their supposed right to peacefully assemble and air their grievances, when lo and behold, here come the cops to escalate the situation and gas some people. This has become commonplace, except when the protesters happen to be doughy white neckbeards toting assault rifles and traitor-slaver flags.
One frequent trope invoked by defenders of bad behavior is the "sheepdog" scenario, that the sheepdogs (cops) are there to protect the sheep (god-fearin' law-abidin' citizens) from wolves (criminals), and that the basic premise of protesting killer cops is really the wolf trying to convince the sheep that the sheepdog is not necessary.
Setting aside the obnoxious, paternalistic tone (not to mention exploitative -- sheep are raised and protected as commodities of commercial value, after all) of the analogy, maybe we should focus a bit on the actual mechanics of it. It's not just a dumb analogy, once you think about the specifics and apply them by their own logic. It's a mission statement.
Because here's the thing -- if you're a sheep rancher, and you have many sheep and a few dogs, and one of the dogs keeps attacking sheep, well, you're not going to keep using that particular dog, are you? The dog either comes back to stay at the house, or he goes to a nice farm upstate. You don't keep him out there attacking the flock, and you don't just hand him off to another sheep rancher to attack his flock.
Decades of true-crime and crime-drama narratives -- aka "copaganda" -- have inured many civilians to the systemic abuses that perpetuate, conditioning us to think of these incidents as unfortunate occasions, the unintended consequences of necessary excesses. I get that, I really do. I love well-done crime shows and books, and frequently leave Law & Order marathons going on in the background when I'm working on stuff. It's easy to see how long-term exposure to those narratives conditions viewers to assume that every perp is a potential Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson.
But there's really no excuse for what happened to Elijah McClain, or George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, or Daniel Shaver, or many many others. The problem is that nothing gets done about the people who commit those crimes, or the systems in which such people proliferate.
Frankly, I'm not terribly bothered by the idea of an actual bad guy getting roughed up a bit, whether from resisting arrest, or getting tuned up in the interrogation room. (Within reason, of course. I am not suggesting that cops should routinely beat the shit out of every dipshit with a gang tat on his neck.) But that's not what's going on here. Over and over we're seeing indisputable video evidence of harmless, unarmed, defenseless, frequently intimidated people getting smacked and stomped and gassed and beaten. There's a clear pattern here.
It's worth considering -- the real protest at the vigil for Elijah McClain was not civilians protesting for the right of a civilian to carry his fuckin' groceries home and not get killed for it. The real protest there was the cops, who are demonstrating for the continued privileges of gassing and beating inconvenient citizens, for the discretion to decide who they get to treat like some IED-planting insurgent in Fallujah, and for the right to avoid any and all modes of accountability when their excesses cost people their lives. They wanted to stir up some shit, just to remind the livestock who's got the whip hand, who's in the herd and who's doing the herding.
A lot of people would probably just settle for identifying the thugs and dirtbags, weeding them out, and making sure they never get paid to carry a weapon or use force on another human being again. But even that is unacceptable to them. That's what the police are protesting. That's why they're escalating peaceful gatherings into riots, shoving elderly cancer patients into sidewalks, macing teenage girls and kicking them in the face when they're already down.
If they were doing those things to MS-13 gangstas caught in the act, you'd probably hear about it, and you might not even have much of a problem with it in general. Strange that it doesn't seem to happen nearly as often.
It may take some time, but eventually Elijah McClain's family is probably going to get some sort of settlement, probably in the six or seven figures. Guess who gets to pay for that? You know what the NYPD's annual budget is just for paying settlements on police brutality and civil rights violations?
There are a lot of livestock ranchers around here, and I know some of them. Dogs don't live out in the pasture with the herd full-time, you know. Dogs are actually only used when it's time to move the herd, to another field or to a trailer to head for the auction yard. That's when "herd" becomes a verb.
You know what most of the sheep and goat ranchers (around here, anyway) leave out in the pasture with the flocks to keep away predators (which, as it happens, are usually loose dogs)? Llamas or emus, sometimes noisier birds such as geese or peacocks. But you would never leave a dog -- or worse yet, multiple dogs -- out in a pasture with sheep. Have you ever seen what large, aggressive dogs do when they congregate in a pack?
Here's a couple things I do know, just to pick a couple of random, if notorious examples:
- Back in 2012, when demented shitbag James Holmes shot up a movie theater, slaughtering a dozen people and injuring five dozen more, the Aurora police were able to bring him in without putting him a sleeper hold, or grinding a knee into his neck, or shooting him a half-dozen times in the back, or making him crawl on the fucking ground, crying and mewling like an animal, before dispatching him anyway, just because.
- When demented racist shitbag Dylann Roof and his bowl haircut slaughtered a bunch of elderly people in a church, the cops took him to fucking Burger King before booking him.
It sure is funny how these people, who have military-grade weapons and armor and training, and are given broad powers of discretion in urgent situations (most importantly, determining whether a situation in even "urgent" in the first place), somehow manage to defuse situations where there's already a pile of bodies. Yet they're pretty good at going full-throttle tough-guy when there's a scared 140-pound kid walking home with a sack of groceries.
Really keeping the mean streets of Aurora safe for humanity, you guys. Be proud of yourselves. Take a photo at your trophy site.
Keep in mind that McClain was actually killed nearly a year ago. The only reason you're finally hearing about it is because of the more recent murders and assaults that have received more notoriety and scrutiny.
So cut to a few days ago, when z group of citizens decided to exercise their supposed right to peacefully assemble and air their grievances, when lo and behold, here come the cops to escalate the situation and gas some people. This has become commonplace, except when the protesters happen to be doughy white neckbeards toting assault rifles and traitor-slaver flags.
One frequent trope invoked by defenders of bad behavior is the "sheepdog" scenario, that the sheepdogs (cops) are there to protect the sheep (god-fearin' law-abidin' citizens) from wolves (criminals), and that the basic premise of protesting killer cops is really the wolf trying to convince the sheep that the sheepdog is not necessary.
Setting aside the obnoxious, paternalistic tone (not to mention exploitative -- sheep are raised and protected as commodities of commercial value, after all) of the analogy, maybe we should focus a bit on the actual mechanics of it. It's not just a dumb analogy, once you think about the specifics and apply them by their own logic. It's a mission statement.
Because here's the thing -- if you're a sheep rancher, and you have many sheep and a few dogs, and one of the dogs keeps attacking sheep, well, you're not going to keep using that particular dog, are you? The dog either comes back to stay at the house, or he goes to a nice farm upstate. You don't keep him out there attacking the flock, and you don't just hand him off to another sheep rancher to attack his flock.
Decades of true-crime and crime-drama narratives -- aka "copaganda" -- have inured many civilians to the systemic abuses that perpetuate, conditioning us to think of these incidents as unfortunate occasions, the unintended consequences of necessary excesses. I get that, I really do. I love well-done crime shows and books, and frequently leave Law & Order marathons going on in the background when I'm working on stuff. It's easy to see how long-term exposure to those narratives conditions viewers to assume that every perp is a potential Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson.
But there's really no excuse for what happened to Elijah McClain, or George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, or Daniel Shaver, or many many others. The problem is that nothing gets done about the people who commit those crimes, or the systems in which such people proliferate.
Frankly, I'm not terribly bothered by the idea of an actual bad guy getting roughed up a bit, whether from resisting arrest, or getting tuned up in the interrogation room. (Within reason, of course. I am not suggesting that cops should routinely beat the shit out of every dipshit with a gang tat on his neck.) But that's not what's going on here. Over and over we're seeing indisputable video evidence of harmless, unarmed, defenseless, frequently intimidated people getting smacked and stomped and gassed and beaten. There's a clear pattern here.
It's worth considering -- the real protest at the vigil for Elijah McClain was not civilians protesting for the right of a civilian to carry his fuckin' groceries home and not get killed for it. The real protest there was the cops, who are demonstrating for the continued privileges of gassing and beating inconvenient citizens, for the discretion to decide who they get to treat like some IED-planting insurgent in Fallujah, and for the right to avoid any and all modes of accountability when their excesses cost people their lives. They wanted to stir up some shit, just to remind the livestock who's got the whip hand, who's in the herd and who's doing the herding.
A lot of people would probably just settle for identifying the thugs and dirtbags, weeding them out, and making sure they never get paid to carry a weapon or use force on another human being again. But even that is unacceptable to them. That's what the police are protesting. That's why they're escalating peaceful gatherings into riots, shoving elderly cancer patients into sidewalks, macing teenage girls and kicking them in the face when they're already down.
If they were doing those things to MS-13 gangstas caught in the act, you'd probably hear about it, and you might not even have much of a problem with it in general. Strange that it doesn't seem to happen nearly as often.
It may take some time, but eventually Elijah McClain's family is probably going to get some sort of settlement, probably in the six or seven figures. Guess who gets to pay for that? You know what the NYPD's annual budget is just for paying settlements on police brutality and civil rights violations?
There are a lot of livestock ranchers around here, and I know some of them. Dogs don't live out in the pasture with the herd full-time, you know. Dogs are actually only used when it's time to move the herd, to another field or to a trailer to head for the auction yard. That's when "herd" becomes a verb.
You know what most of the sheep and goat ranchers (around here, anyway) leave out in the pasture with the flocks to keep away predators (which, as it happens, are usually loose dogs)? Llamas or emus, sometimes noisier birds such as geese or peacocks. But you would never leave a dog -- or worse yet, multiple dogs -- out in a pasture with sheep. Have you ever seen what large, aggressive dogs do when they congregate in a pack?
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