Quotulatiousness

March 2, 2010

Linking Olympic glory with jackbooted thugs?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:14

Frequent commenter “Lickmuffin” responded to the post entitled SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing with a long comment tying together the Olympics and the omnipresent SWAT teams:

I have to say that I really don’t understand your views here.
Olympic fascist spectacle: A-OK!
The actual functional trappings of a police state: Boo, hiss!
You can’t have one without the other. As the man said, you have to break a few skulls to make Olympic Gold. Or something like that.

Lickmuffin then provided an extended discussion on the same theme:

It’s quite simple, really: if you want to host the Olympics, and you want to have a succesful national Olympic team, you have to have armed-to-the teeth SWAT teams.

To fund the Olympics and Olympians, you need to have confiscatory tax rates.

When you have confiscatory tax rates, you’re going to have people trying to avoid the taxes.

Some of those people are going to engage in dodgy and risky behaviour, such as importing, growing, manufacturing or just generally dealing with narcotics.

Some of those people are going to use violence to protect their businesses.

To deal with those guys, you need heavily armed and specially trained police.

Just three degrees of separation there, really, but it works out to something like this:

Publicly funded Olympics = SWAT teams on every corner.

What do we tell people whose family members are killed in no-knock raids where the cops had the wrong address? “Sorry about that, but that snowboarding dude needed a gold medal.”

It’s ironic that the first snowboarder to win a medal for the sport — a Canadian — tested positive for weed.

It’s not ironic at all that the same dude wants to become a Liberal MP. Snowboard boots, jackboots — same thing, really.

It really does cover all the ground, doesn’t it? Just lacking the obligatory German rendering of SWAT as Sturmabteilung, and we’re golden, as they say.

QotD: The true nature of school

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:04

If you objected to high school students getting spied on in their homes by school district-issued webcams, maybe junior high students under nonstop cam surveillance on school grounds by a tubby administrator with a chinbeard (but no chin) will be the charm [. . .] I’m creeped out by the obvious glee with which Beardy McBeardsworth describes his prey at a Bronx junior high school in almost exactly the same tones you hear from Air Force flacks narrating thermal footage of hits on insurgents. But I must acknowledge that the concept of school as a place where the rights of students are severely curtailed dates back at least to my own schooling during King Philip’s War, was recently upheld by the Supreme Court in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case, and seems to enjoy broad popular support. For the majority of Americans alive today, the function of school has always been to break you for a workplace where you will meet obstruction and indignity every day, be subject to every type of invasive surveillance, and generally, as even that greatest of working stiffs Jerry Langford put it, “have idiots plaguing your life.”

Tim Cavanaugh, “Junior High Lives of Others”, Hit and Run, 2010-03-01

SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:48

Or, more accurately, militarizing the sort of police activity that ordinary police officers would once have done:

. . . last year Maryland became the first state in the country to make every one of its police departments issue a report on how often and for what purpose they use their SWAT teams. The first reports from the legislation are in, and the results are disturbing.

Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George’s County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state’s SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.

Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war.

It’s easy to see how this happened, all over North America, not just in Maryland. Increasing perception of the dangers of the drug war fed the demand for more SWAT-type forces in more and more police departments. Once in place, extensively equipped and expensively trained, the police authorities needed to justify keeping these teams active and involved . . . that is, they couldn’t pay them to sit around waiting for a hostage-taking or a major drug bust. They needed those officers to be out doing things — preferably media-friendly “big” things.

Even in the most dangerous areas, there are only so many situations that rationally require the heavy hand of the fully-armed SWAT team, so the incentives were already in place to expand the role from the original (and relatively rare) combat-style deployment to other, less dangerous (but often more mediagenic) crime fighting.

Anyone in the army can tell you that even in wartime, the majority of soldiers don’t get shot at: they patrol, they train, they do various military and non-military activites. For policemen-as-combat-troops, there are even fewer chances to use all their expensive equipment and training. The temptation to use the SWAT team for less and less dangerous activities is overwhelming, which is why you get the lads and lasses in bullet-proof vests and army helmets appearing even for non-violent misdemeanor offenses.

The choices for law enforcement are not good: disband your SWAT team and run the risk of not having the resources on hand when you actually do need that kind of force, or stay the course, keep the SWAT team(s), and keep them busy so it doesn’t look like you’re wasting a big chunk of your annual budget on inessential services. The bureaucratic instinct is to avoid courses which carry a potential result that could reflect negatively on the organization — which is why you rarely hear about police departments giving up their SWAT teams.

Military neglect: “it’s how we’ve always done it”

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:23

Matt Gurney discusses the military share of the federal budget, in light of proposed spending restrictions in the upcoming throne speech:

It can’t be denied that the Harper government has delivered what the troops needed. German-made tanks, American transport helicopters and British artillery cannons have made our troops more effective and harder to kill. But it has also revealed an enduring flaw in Canadian military procurement policy: In peacetime, we convince ourselves we’ll never need a military, and in wartime, we pay through the nose to buy one off the shelf. From building virtually a whole new navy and air force to battle the Nazis, to the recent race to get drones and helicopters into Kandahar in time to make a difference, it’s how we’ve always done it. This must change.

Neglecting our Forces in peacetime and then racing to properly equip them once they’re already committed to battle not only puts our men and women in danger, it’s fiscally inefficient. It would be better, both for our military and our treasury, to commit ourselves to maintaining a large, robust military in peacetime that is capable of going to war on short notice, with all it needs already on hand. That means maintaining a high tempo of training, recruiting enough manpower to fill the ranks, and replacing obsolete or worn out equipment promptly.

[. . .] arguably, each branch of the Canadian Forces, most particularly the army but certainly the navy as well, ought to be considerably larger than it is. Even if Canadians are willing to settle for the status quo — a small military that uses technology and guts to punch above its weight — we’re going to need to spend to keep us there.

Many will no doubt argue that Canada doesn’t need a powerful military. But to their credit, the Conservatives, who’ve spent the last several years positioning themselves as the party that gave the military its pride back, aren’t taking that line. Thursday’s budget — and those that follow it — must put the money where their mouths have been.

Historically, Canadians have not supported military spending outside wartime. The necessity of paying for salaries, training, and equipment when they’re not actively being employed seems to most Canadians to be wasted spending. Even when the government manages to overcome its hesitation to spend money on new kit, it is viewed primarily as a source of regional development assistance, political patronage, or industrial policy, rather than providing the troops with the tools they need to do their jobs.

It’s (barely) possible that the goalposts have shifted over the last several years: Canada’s military has a higher profile in public eyes than at any time since 1945. Canadians are far more individually supportive of soldiers, sailors, and airmen than ever before. Perhaps there won’t be the political cost to the government for paying the extra financial costs to keep our military kit up to current standards.

But the smart money isn’t betting on that as the most likely outcome.

Those ominous parallels again

Filed under: Cancon, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:53

I originally just added this as a comment on this post, but it appears to have a bit more life in it.

Gil LeBreton made this pithy observation in his column about the Vancouver Olympics on the 28th of February:

After a spirited torch relay ignited pride in every corner of the country, the Olympic Games began and quickly galvanized the nation.

Flags were everywhere. The country’s national symbol hung from windows and was worn on nearly everyone’s clothing.

Fervent crowds cheered every victory by the host nation.

But enough about the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

I thought it was amusing, so I just added it to the comment thread, but I guess I wasn’t the only one to notice Mr. LeBreton’s insight:

So true. The parallels between Berlin 1936 and Vancouver 2010 are clear, if you just pay attention.

Not everyone has the perspicacity to discern the neo-Nazi threat north of America’s borders. Fortunately, Mr. LeBreton does. Because he’s more observant than most. He makes the cognitive connections others miss:

“For 17 days we were barraged with Canadian flags, rode buses and trains with people in sweatshirts and jerseys adorned with Canadian maple leafs, and were serenaded at venues by Canadian spectators, lustily cheering for Canadian athletes.”

My God. It’s spine-chilling.

The rest of the world was lulled into complacency and Olympic fever. But the Star-Telegram’s crack reporter wasn’t fooled by the crafty Canucks. Their display of patriotism reminded him of something. Something terrifying.

“I didn’t attend the ’36 Olympics, but I’ve seen the pictures. Swastikas everywhere.”

You see? Maple leaf flag equals swastika. Damn you, Canada.

He’s so right. Connect the dots! Look it up, sheeple!

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