How is this different from any other day?
How many drug offenders died in prison yesterday?
How many
How many will die today?
Yes, muscular squirrels are pleased by the specific killing of a thing.
Yes, Barack fucking Pendragon Obama arrogated a newly un-enumerated power to command his spokesperson to hold a press conference to better brag about the premeditated killing of things.
But, in case we're unclear on American history, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. States have claimed the power to dispense with the lives of their subject-property for as long as there have been states. Some of them pretty up the process with rituals of surrender and sanctification. Some execute their power to kill on the installment plan, taking twenty or forty years to do what a hangman's noose would do in five minutes.
States kill. It's what they do.
Notice all the men in uniforms with state issued weapons?
They are not for show...
7 comments:
states fight over the right to claim your person as an economic resource. One way to resolve which state currently has the right is to exercise the power of killing that person. If a state kills you, its a pretty good indication that they have already claiming you as a resource base, or are challenging another state's claim.
What is it, probably 75% of Balloon Juice readers are fully supportive of state sanctioned murder? They sound almost indistinguishable from their right-wing comrades--the only difference is the degree of glee they admit to feeling in response to state murder. The liberals aren't *quite* as proud of murdering Arabs as conservatives, but notice the Democratic/Obama-loving faithful no longer wring their hands about Obama's constitutional excesses--they no longer even give lip service to civil liberties. They now openly support state-sanctioned murder as righteous and use the same justifications the right-wing uses.
Fuck them. No wonder I don't read that piece of shit Balloon Juice blog. Gross. All I can think of is these piece of shit bloom juices watching the electoral returns in November as they root for their team like its the Super Bowl.
The role the press played in this sorry assassination is also disgusting. Watching the boob tube this morning the major news simply regurgitated government propaganda without even a single comment about the implications for civil liberties. Plus, they act like the guy was convicted in court and simply accept the government's "evidence", even though it mostly amounts to speech--vague sermons. They aren't even showing a clip of his sermons or even deigning to provide viewers with an understanding of what he was preaching or why his speech was illegal or constituted acts of war.
Jack, when I heard they had murdered the guy in Yemen I thought the same thing as you. Why start getting all up in arms about it now? Shit like that's been going on for a long time right here in Downtown, USA.
Bleah.
I don't know, I think the state murdering citizens as good a reason of getting up in arms about.
I also think lobbing missiles from a robot in the sky at citizens is at least noteworthy for its novelty.
Nice post, States are just the biggest gang on the block hiding behind legitimacy.
Walter,
I wonder at the persistence of party loyalty in our age of naked betrayal of the base, by both major corporate parties.
There's a mechanism there. It exceeds the "paranoid style," now. I'm loathe to call it pathology, but it does seem like a ruttedness.
Justin,
I think it's possible to agree with Drunken, that one more state crime really isn't all that surprising while still retaining a human outrage.
I think for liberals who decry Obama's breach with circumspection the problem isn't that the state is killing people. It's that the State might very theoretically kill them, because they mostly still buy into the idea that the government, or its state, in some way has a right to possess them as citizens.
Rob,
Mafias don't usually maintain prisons. That, and the scale of operation, are really the only big differences between government protection rackets and "criminal" ones.
Post a Comment