UC Davis police officer pepper sprays sitting students because, well, just because.
Think that’s %$#ing horrible? The video’s worse.
Via John Aravosis at AmericaBlog:
I’m sorry, this has gone too far. This has happened in police department after police department, and it has gone too far. Our police look like the goons in Russia and China. Please watch this video and send it to everyone you know. This has gone too far.
One of the weird things about being connected to news feeds from all over the world (well, mostly detailed ones from the U.S. and China), is that whenever I’m about to exuberantly type about something I learned over here about innovation and the goodness of technology and CHANGE(!!), I open up Tumblr (or Twitter) and come across this and the wind comes out of my sails.
I’m used to seeing it from my China feed, which is currently tweeting and RTing this story of a nine-seat van carrying 63 kindergartenders that crashed into a truck and killed 20 of the passengers. It’s a stark example of the outrageous injustices that happen all the time in so many places thanks to badly enforced regulation and no effective method of stymieing political corruption.
But man. The US feed is supposed to be about funny charts and occasional videos of politicians acting stupid. Instead, there’s been horrible pictures like this or this (of a maced granny) which AmericaBlog has pointed out seems so… aberrant.
I’m not complaining or saying that now that it’s happening, it shouldn’t be on my feed. I’m just so so so disappointed that this is being allowed to happen at all in America. It’s inexcusable enough in China, where there hasn’t been a long debate about human rights and sticking to the charters we’ve created to protect those rights. In America, where we love to tout our democratic process and our love of peaceful protest and always having a voice… what the fuck!
—
Random notes:
a) The amount of cameras/cameraphones all around.
b) Does that cop have his hand in his pocket?
“When we would become friendly with an office and they were important to us, and the chief of staff was a competent person, I would say or my staff would say to him or her at some point, ‘You know, when you’re done working on the Hill, we’d very much like you to consider coming to work for us.’ Now the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to ’em, that was it. We owned them.”
Former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, now released from prison, explaining how he commonly dangled jobs to win favors from congressional staffers. He told CBS “60 Minutes” that he’s thinking of writing a book: “The Idiot’s Guide to Buying a Congressman.” (via officialssay)“I used to wonder: Is Huxley right or is Orwell right? It turns out they’re both right. First you get the new world state [Brave New World] and endless diversions as you are disempowered. And then, as we are watching, credit dries up, and the cheap manufactured goods of the consumer society are no longer cheap. Then you get the iron fist of Oceania, of Orwell’s 1984.”
That’s NY Times journalist Chris Hedges in an interview with The Progressive. He keeps going:
That’s precisely the process that’s happened. We have been very effectively pacified by the pernicious ideology of a consumer society that is centered on the cult of the self—an undiluted hedonism and narcissism. That has become a very effective way to divert our attention while the country is reconfigured into a kind of neofeudalism, with a rapacious oligarchic elite and an anemic government that no longer is able to intercede on behalf of citizens but cravenly serves the interests of the oligarchy itself.
(via utnereader)
So I think this went well? Now I’m going to turn it into a book called HACK: The Thirty Pundits Who Are Hurting the Country, Tearing Us Apart, Destroying the Middle Class, and Making a Killing… and What We Can Do to Stop them Before It’s Too Late
(Butseriouslyfolks thanks everyone who linked to this on the Twitter machine and “reglogged” it on Tumblr and so on. Huge, gargantuan thanks. American thanks. The way I remember thanks being when I was growing up. The thanks of our fathers.)
Amazingly well! This made my morning so much less horrible, so much more hilarious!
