{"id":2946,"date":"2010-03-02T17:14:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-02T21:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=2946"},"modified":"2010-03-02T17:14:16","modified_gmt":"2010-03-02T21:14:16","slug":"linking-olympic-glory-with-jackbooted-thugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/03\/02\/linking-olympic-glory-with-jackbooted-thugs\/","title":{"rendered":"Linking Olympic glory with jackbooted thugs?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\n

I have to say that I really don\u2019t understand your views here.
Olympic fascist spectacle: A-OK!
The actual functional trappings of a police state: Boo, hiss!
You can\u2019t have one without the other. As the man said, you have to break a few skulls to make Olympic Gold. Or something like that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Lickmuffin then provided an extended discussion on the same theme:<\/p>\n

\n

It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

To fund the Olympics and Olympians, you need to have confiscatory tax rates.<\/p>\n

When you have confiscatory tax rates, you\u2019re going to have people trying to avoid the taxes.<\/p>\n

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

Some of those people are going to use violence to protect their businesses.<\/p>\n

To deal with those guys, you need heavily armed and specially trained police.<\/p>\n

Just three degrees of separation there, really, but it works out to something like this:<\/p>\n

Publicly funded Olympics = SWAT teams on every corner.<\/p>\n

What do we tell people whose family members are killed in no-knock raids where the cops had the wrong address? \u201cSorry about that, but that snowboarding dude needed a gold medal.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s ironic that the first snowboarder to win a medal for the sport — a Canadian — tested positive for weed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not ironic at all that the same dude wants to become a Liberal MP. Snowboard boots, jackboots — same thing, really.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It really does cover all the ground, doesn’t it? Just lacking the obligatory German rendering of SWAT as Sturmabteilung<\/em>, and we’re golden, as they say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t understand your views here.Olympic fascist spectacle: A-OK!The actual functional trappings of a police state: Boo, hiss!You can\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,84,18],"tags":[343,314,98,118],"class_list":["post-2946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-government","category-sports","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-olympics","tag-police","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-Lw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2946"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2948,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2946\/revisions\/2948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}