Head Down, Move Forward

If you're tired of bearing witness to this sort of ongoing bullshit, you have but one option, and it's a horrendously slim chance at best:  vote.

And it's even worse than that, takes more effort:  vote every day, with your wallet as well as your ballot; pay attention to everything, so that you know what and who you're voting for, how people and organizations are interconnected, and frequently in cahoots.

Sounds like work. Even in the best of times, whenever those were, if they ever existed, being a citizen was always intended to be something of a job. To remain literate and engaged and critically thoughtful is an endless process, and in a society that has conditioned itself to be "productive" and "goal-oriented" when it's not also telling you to consume and don't ask too many questions, takes real time and effort and commitment.

It's going to be a steady, determined trudge, if it even gets accomplished at all. There's much more to it than merely getting rid of Trump and flipping the Senate. This will take a decade or maybe a full generation of committed effort, of not getting distracted or drawn into the weeds of sealions and culture warriors. Either you've had enough of this shit, or you haven't.

After the protests are over and people go home, the real work begins. Hopefully they haven't been randomly battered by bored and hostile jackboots seething in their secret police uniforms, just looking for a defenseless hippie to punch, since they don't go after people who can actually defend themselves.

Ask yourself what sort of person maces a sitting teenage girl, and then kicks her in the face, or shoves an elderly cancer patient into a sidewalk, cracking his skull, and just walks on by. Or pepper-sprays people randomly, for nothing more than exercising their rights to peacefully assemble and air their grievances.

Look, if your profession -- which has a lower casualty rate than farmers and roofers -- has you in such an eternal state of fearful over-vigilance, maybe it's time to look at other career options. A good plumber or electrician can make a shitload of money, and never have to worry about the next person they pull over being some MS-13 nothing-to-lose psychopath out of a Law & Order episode. I have a hell of a lot more respect for someone who knows their limitations and changes tack, over someone who doubles down on fear and force and cultural insularity, and takes out their frustrations on people who can't fight back and have no recourse to the law.

We can play the "not all cops / not all protesters" game all day, but only one of those groups gets away routinely with the indiscriminate use of excessive, deadly force on innocent people. Only one of those groups, when caught on video indisputably committing a horrible, violent crime, instantly gets the benefits of a powerful union backing him, and his colleagues across the country violently proclaiming their unwavering support for more damage to the civilians they are supposed to protect and serve. The individuals in one of those groups gets held accountable; the other group, not so much.

Some cities have tried to leaven the violent chaos by posting cutesy videos of their forces, in full riot gear, line dancing with the protesters or some such. In some cases, less than an hour after the performance, they're back to cracking skulls, caging groups of peaceful marchers so they can gas them some more.

Save the dance videos, guys. Just stop hurting harmless people. You keep hearing stories about looters, but there sure don't seem to be any videos of cops gang-tackling or baton-whipping them. It seems to be almost exclusively people trying to speak peacefully and reason with them, before a rubber bullet explodes their eyeball or they get maced or whatever. Takes a real tough guy to beat the shit out someone who can't or won't fight back.

So vote, and don't just blindly vote for Generic Democrat I Think I've Heard Of. Most major cities are run by Democratic mayors and Democratic councils and city officials, and they are clearly all terrified of these militarized vigilante gangs roaming their streets, abusing powerless civilians under the color of misused authoritah.

No, when it comes to city government, you need people who are going to offer two options to the corrupt edifice of urban law enforcement -- repair or replace. No more urban-warfare toys from the Army. No more "training" like you're going into the IDF to patrol the Gaza Strip. No more winking at associations with white-power or insurrectionist groups. No more "qualified immunity" bullshit. No more civil asset forfeiture giving law enforcement agencies a vested interest in busting certain entities. No more quietly brushing under the rug the myriad abuses that never quite make the national radar.

If there's one thing about the protests that I might mildly quibble with, it's the idea that this is all about racism. Certainly racism is a significant component of this, but the Minneapolis Police Department has had this problem for a while. But the cop that murdered Philando Castile was Latino. The cop that murdered Justine Damond -- a pretty white woman! -- was Somali.

Remember the murder of poor Daniel Shaver, made to crawl and beg for his life before a gutless piece of shit perforated him anyway? White cop, white victim, bullshit trial, full acquittal and the motherfucker had the gall to collect disability because he was traumatized by the act of unnecessarily humiliating and murdering an innocent man in a hotel hallway. So now that cop -- who even now is only thirty years old -- got "medically retired" with a pension of $2,500/month. You think the video of George Floyd's murder is tough to watch (and it is), go back and watch the video of Daniel Shaver's murder.

(I'd actually like to give Philip Brailsford the benefit of the doubt on the PTSD thing. I hope he is haunted terribly by the memory of what he did to Daniel Shaver that night. It would be the merest sliver of justice if, on a nightly basis, Brailsford had to fight for decent sleep, only to have his slumber intruded by the smoky tendrils of a hazy memory of that hallway, he and his partner screaming contradictory, impossible commands at a terrified, sobbing man who was just blowing off some steam after work and minding his own fucking business, before killing him for no goddamned reason other than to prove that they could. Whether Brailsford lives another five or fifty or a hundred years, hopefully every night's attempt at rest is interrupted and punctuated by that memory. He deserves at least that much.)

The point is this -- we should have been having this discussion a long time ago. It should not have taken an indisputably incriminating video taken by a frightened seventeen-year-old girl to get people talking about what we all already knew. I am not in the "abolish cops" camp; I know too many of them who are and have been good and decent people who genuinely want to help their communities and keep people safe. They do exist. Collections of anecdata are not dispositive evidence, but it's not nothing, either. I don't want to punish good people in the process of punishing bad people.

But now is the time for that majority of good cops to find ways to step up and be part of getting rid of the bastards and assholes who make them all look bad by association. If they choose not to, they may not like the outcome that a distressed, dispossessed, disempowered populace decides for them. Your little friendly-stormtrooper dance videos do not offset all the broken necks and broken lives over the years, and the nameless, identity-free prison screws and "bortac" hard-asses currently "guarding" the nation's monuments and the "bunker baby" chief executive, a cheap dime-store Ceausescu whose biggest fear has always been being held accountable for who and what he's been his entire life.

Just stop hurting the harmless, and start holding each other accountable for doing that. Those two things alone would resolve about eighty percent of this.

Organized Crime

Read this thread, and try to picture the fuckers doing this shit -- shoving old people to the asphalt, shooting teenage girls in the eye with rubber bullets, "lighting up" people for the high crime of sitting on their own front porch -- and tell me they're not thugs and bullies and cowards. Not all cops, nor even most of them, but those cops? Yeah.

Thugs. Bullies. Cowards.

Thugs.

Bullies.

Cowards.

Those guys are neither protecting nor serving. Maybe the protesters should have shown up with Meal Team Six cosplay gear and assault rifles, threatening to lynch their elected representatives. Instead they're completely unarmed, but daring to criticize the people who show no respect to them in the first place, and are beaten and shot. Blinding reporters, launching projectiles at citizens in their own homes, infiltrating crowds in order to agitate and escalate, and give their colleagues an excuse to whup some ass.

And it's no surprise or coincidence that many of the same people who supported the rights of heavily-armed slobs to threaten and terrorize because DURR MUH HAIRCUT are insisting that these protesters must do what they're told. Certain people have to obey and comply, even if they're protesting peacefully and avoiding confrontation. See how that works?

On the positive side, Dear Leader now has something other than photos of his eldest daughter to jerk off to, while he cowers in his bunker. Like all fake tough guys, he loves this shit -- makes him feel like a big man without actually having to do anything or endanger himself, just like his entire life.

The endorsement between him and the paramilitary thugs is mutual. He literally told them to get rough with suspects, and they literally cheered him at the prospect. That actually happened, and we all saw the video. Each gives -- no, encourages -- the other to indulge in their worst impulses, completely unrestrained, unconcerned about anyone else's rights, in a country that can't lecture the rest of the world often enough about how all its inhabitants are created equal.

We've all heard the anecdotes over the years about how the high-octane grifters in the financial suites go to watch movies like The Wolf of Wall Street or The Big Short, and inevitably side with the thieves and looters, the moral monsters. Consider that we are currently being run by the people who watched, say, the Star Wars movies, and sided with the Empire. I'm putting it into a pop-culture metaphor to make it slightly more palatable, but the point is dead serious. Consider the sort of person who looks at a clear moral example in a universally known entertainment commodity, still decides to align themselves with the unmistakable bad guys, and now give that person unlimited power.

As I've been saying recently, when people talk about "saving America," they need to really think in granular detail about all that. Save what, and for whom, and how? There's a lot more to all that than just getting rid of Trump and his vile lackeys in the Senate. That's just the absolute bare minimum to start on what will be a generational project. Drumming violent fascists and racists out of public service employment is going to take a concerted effort for a number of years. They're like cockroaches -- if you see one on your floor, there's probably a nest in the wall.

Urban police forces are making it clear to all of us, whether we live in the cities or not, that they intend to behave like occupying armies. This is not an issue of "training" -- this is their training. Too many of them have been looking forward to something like this, the chance to beat or kill a libturd or hippie, and too few of them have the courage to speak out or resist or even just find another line of work, to walk away from the prospect of murdering the citizens you're supposed to be protecting.

The "few bad apples" theory doesn't work if the supposed majority of good apples never make any effort to clean up the barrel.

Nothing will be done about any of this. Anyone still counting themselves a Republicon is all-in. They support fascism and authoritarianism, no matter how they might verbally demur or rationalize all this. They're good with it. This is what they want. Democrats, on the other hand, are terrified at the possibility of ever being seen as even a micron off-target with being "law and order" or whatever you want to call it. If we can't beat peaceful, unarmed protesters, how can we hold the line against MS-13? That sort of thing.

How to Get Away with Murder

There are many ways, of course, if you are imaginative enough. But one surefire, can't-miss, no-fail way to get away with stone cold murder:  be a white cop killing a black man. Never fails.

Hopefully no one is fooled by the Dallas prosecutor charging Amber Guyger with manslaughter, because it's a "safer" conviction than a murder charge. It doesn't matter what Guyger is charged with. Mark my words, call your bookie, and bet your entire paycheck, because it's as much of a slam-dunk as saying the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning -- Guyger will walk, and she probably won't even be fired from her fucking job. She might resign on her own, if a big enough stink is raised. But they won't fire her. They've already invested fully into cover-up-and-muddy-the-water mode.

It would be amusing to watch the repeated attempts to get her story straight, if we weren't talking about an innocent man MURDERED in his own fucking house for no goddamned reason, and a bunch of people who entrusted and empowered to SERVE AND PROTECT the public are collectively using every cheap tactic available to avoid accountability.

Whatever bullshit story they finally land on and decide to roll with, chances are it was something stupid, like Guyger being drunk or high. Either that or she had some unknown (so far) beef with Botham Jean. Probably some combination of the two, but whatever the case, this was no accident. It was either gross negligence and dereliction, or outright intent.

Law enforcement and criminal justice professionals, whether they're cops or prosecutors, will all tell you that innocent people have nothing to hide, that people who instinctively clam up and grab a lawyer are almost guaranteed to be guilty of something. Of course, the rules change when it's one of their own, but we all know the truth.

Everyone knows the fix is in and the game is rigged. Everyone knows that cops can do whatever the fuck they please, when it comes to black men. Ask Patrick Dorismond, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, and on and on. For every Michael Slager who gets held accountable, there's a dozen or a score or a hundred who don't. And I promise you, Guyger won't, even though her crime is even more egregious situationally than just about any police shooting.

I mean, how fucking dumb do you have to be to buy the notion that a police officer, a member of a profession that is trained rigorously to observe, did not know her own apartment -- especially since her apartment was not only on another floor, but had additional locks on the entry door because of her occupation. And Botham Jean had a huge red welcome mat outside his entry door. Either Guyger is a laughably bad cop who never should have been on the job in the first place, or she's lying because she knows she fucked up.

But not really. I hope I'm wrong, but I know what country this is. All it takes is one "cops is never wrong" doofus on the jury to jack the verdict, and Guyger walks. Don't think that she and her friends on the blue wall don't know that. This thing will get tossed, and even if Jean's family pursues a lawsuit (and hopefully they do, hopefully they sue Guyger and the police department into absolute penury for their shameful incompetence and reprehensible misconduct throughout), and even if they win a judgment, the amount will be lessened simply by virtue of the fact that a criminal outcome couldn't be attained.

Hell, the aforementioned Slager got a mistrial at first, and the only reason it came back around and he got convicted and sentenced is because he had a long history of that shit -- oh, and his murder of Walter Scott was caught on video. But even with video of Slager shooting Scott five times in the back and planting the gun on him, it took two years and two trials to hold his worthless ass accountable. All anyone has on Guyger is her idiotic fairy tale and a few neighbors who overheard things, some of which may conflict and thus cancel each other out. Then all you're left with is a vulnerable young white woman fending off a menacing black man.

Everyone's up in arms, and rightly so, about the public release of a search warrant of Jean's apartment that turned up a small quantity of pot. What they don't tell you is they were probably looking just as hard for a photo of Jean in a hoodie and baggy pants, maybe throwing gang signs with his hands, that sort of shit. These people are completely without scruple, gearing up to smear and blame a man their employee murdered. Amber Guyger straight-up MURDERED Botham Jean, and she and the Dallas PD are getting away with it, and that's all there is to this.

Even on the million-to-one chance that this was some weird "honest accident," which is already impossible given how Guyger's story has changed from whether the door was locked or ajar, so what? What do you think would happen if you somehow got disoriented and knocked on your neighbor's door, thinking it was your own house, and you pulled your weapon and shot your neighbor when he opened the door, thinking he was burglarizing your house? Seriously? But a police officer makes that sort of fatal "mistake" and they're for some reason given the benefit of the doubt, even thought the standard should be higher.

Again, even on the miniscule chance that Amber Guyger is "innocent," even her own bullshit story proves she has no business being on any police force, or indeed in any position that requires oversight of others' lives. No matter. You just watch -- she'll walk, and the Dallas PD will just get her off the street and give her a desk job. She won't do an hour in jail. Count on it.

Violent Tendencies

Yes, the sooner these silly negroes understand that everyone really is treated equally, and that their "concerns" are simply the manufactured anxieties of the faggot librul media, the better of we'll all be.

Do Your Duty, Flush Twice

Here's just a few of the more outrageous instances of police misconduct and brutality in recent days. Let's take a quick spin around the dial:

• In Loozyanna, a coupla Deppaty Dawg types moonlighting as "town marshals" took it upon themselves to fire upon a truck containing an unarmed man, who may or may not have had a warrant out for his arrest, and may or may not have backed his truck up toward the "marshals" in an attempt to evade them. We'll give these discount motherfuckersfine upstanding Christian men a chance to get their story straight, but in the meantime, one thing is indisputable:  in addition to shooting the alleged perp (who is still barely alive in the hospital), they also hit the man's six-year-old son, who was buckled into the passenger seat, five times, killing him instantly. Good job, guys. You can rationalize it any way you want, but you murdered a first-grader.
• In West Virginny, a state trooper who took it upon himself to be the neighborhood asshole, and had a couple local kids leave wet underwear on the hood of his car as a prank, went over to the home of the kids' friend, and tried to arrest him (because leaving underwear on a car is a capital offense or something). Anyhoo, the kid "resisted arrest" (in other words, questioned Officer Friendly's authoritah to arrest people for nothing), and so of course was summarily pepper sprayed, beaten with a baton, tackled into a ditch (with assistance by a helpful neighbor, since after all, the cop was only half a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier than the kid -- who again, did absolutely nothing wrong in the first place), and finally shot dead like a fucking dog. This actually happened in June of last year, but since prosecutors declined to their job and get this fucking animal out his uniform and into a jail cell, the kid's family decided to file a civil lawsuit. We'll see if they manage to live long enough to see it through.
• Quentin Tarantino got himself on the radar of the Fraternal Order of Police, after having the nerve to attend and speak at a rally against police misconduct. Apparently we have First Amendment rights, as long we don't say something cops disapprove of. Don't be too surprised if QT gets pulled over in the next month or so, and they just happen to find a brick of heroin in his wheel well.
• Finally, we have the story of one Charles Joseph (aka "GI Joe") Gliniewicz, a police lieutenant in the village of Fox Lake, Illinois. Gliniewicz was the third cop to be shot over a particularly violent weekend at the end of August, and his death sparked a huge manhunt, not to mention countless sanctimonious graphic memes from your uncle who does nothing but masturbate on Facebook over "those people".
  
  Gliniewicz had the perfect story for breathless "cop lives matter" coverage by the lazy media -- military veteran, decorated cop, family man with four kids, ran the police youth auxiliary fund. They had this guy nominated for sainthood before they even had him dropped into the ground. Funny thing about all that, though:  turns out GI Joe was stealing from the youth fund, and had a personnel file full of complaints about groping and threatening his colleagues -- when he wasn't pressuring his subordinates into sucking his cock to keep their jobs. Gliniewicz even tried to hire a gang member to assassinate a city administrator who had gotten wise to his embezzlement scheme.
  
  So after weeks of sanctimonious posturing by the usual media assholes (i.e., the slack-jawed mutants at Fixed Noise), it turns out that Gliniewicz, seeing the walls close in, decided to take the weird way out, and killed himself after calling in a foot chase of non-existent perps. It fit in perfectly with the mythical narrative of a "war on cops", even though the violent crime rate and the rate of officers dying on the job have both been steadily declining. They have been notably quiet in the wake of the revelations about Gliniewicz, though. What a surprise.

Oh, and the first officer who was murdered on that fateful weekend in August, shot while pumping gas in Texas? Turns out this fine family man had his mistress in his squad car -- off-duty by the way -- when he was shot by a mentally ill  man who was immediately characterized as a Black Lives Matter activist, although of course that was not at all true. It gets even better -- during the investigation, Goforth's mistress then hooked up with the investigator. Even in Texas, this sort of thing is kinda frowned on. I'd say more, but I'm afraid this cock-gobbling skank might put down whichever knob she's servicing at the moment and try to give me her HPV.

The problem here is one of accountability, of course. As always, most cops are decent people doing difficult work. But I don't want to hear anymore about how tough it is, and we just don't understand. The beauty of living in a (relatively) free country is that you are able to pursue pretty much any line of work you want. So if it gets too tough to be a cop, do yourself and society a huge favor and be a fucking plumber, or a mechanic. The last thing anyone needs is some asshole with a badge, a gun, and a wildly aggrieved sensibility about How Unfair Life Is.

This goes for the people who work with these assholes every day and know something's up. Everyone who had worked with Gliniewicz for years knew he was bent, a corrupt pervert who bullied silent complicity out an institution that he knew was pre-aligned to take his side in the instance of any complaints. They knew GI Joke was a fucking turd, and refused to flush, until it was too late. The state trooper in West Virginia got away scot-free with murdering a kid in his own front yard for no goddamned reason; the best you can hope for there is that the civil lawsuit bankrupts that piece of shit so that he's living on a sidewalk giving handjobs for crack. But we all know that won't happen. The cops who killed that kid in Louisiana, they'll get away with it, the cop who shot that guy in the back in South Carolina and tried to plant a gun on him, he'll get away with it. Just you watch.

In a just and fair world, these clowns would all do the decent thing and eat a fucking bullet, simply because of the burden of living with what they've done. But they won't, because they don't need to. They know they'll get away with their misdeeds. And it happens because they won't flush these fuckers, they never do. They wait and wait and wait until these bent cops snap and kill someone, then do damage control and find a way to get the charges dropped or lowered. Even the WV trooper, he's not going to pay a dime, unless they're able to get him on the civil lawsuit as well. But chances are they'll just hit the deep pockets, the city and county and state. So the West Virginia taxpayers will pay for this murderous turd, and he'll continue to work until he cashes out with a 90% pension.

The argument is not whether cops lives matter; of course they do. The problem is that cops have come to think that their lives matter more than yours or mine; they no longer regard themselves as servants of the public interest, but a specialized class of paramilitarized guardians who can do whatever they want, and demand only compliance and obedience from the public. Anything else gives them license to kill, and they are all too happy to use that license, since they can do so with impunity.