Right wing politicians are using the latest mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso as an excuse to say that they need the same sweeping rights to invade privacy that they currently use to combat foreign terrorists against potential American domestic terrorist threats. It’s not hard to see how these tools would quickly be used to crack down on any form of dissent.
Don’t Worry, the Government Will only Use Their New Anti-Mass Shooting to Suppress Us
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Nice one. That last panel in particular is basically exactly how we got to our current state of free speech here in Russia. First it was just the anti-Semites. Then the communists and the nationalists. Liberals were all the way behind restricting their rights to free speech. Then suddenly, shock and dismay, this became extended to them as well inasmuch as they didn’t roll over to support the slightly altered agenda under Putin. Funnily they also backed various laws to punish and hamper public protests, also to hurt communists, only to whinge and cry every time they were lawfully and consistently deployed against them too.
It’s not hard to see how these tools would quickly be used to crack down on any form of dissent. «{D]issent» ?!! But why should anybody who has the privilege of living in the Shining City on a Hill want to dissent, Ted ?…
Henri
PS : In 2017, Mr Rosenstein was appointed Deputy Attorney General by Mr Trump, not by Mr Obama….
And the temperature in the pot goes up a couple more degrees. The frog squirms a little, but decides it’s nothing to be alarmed about . . . YAWN . . .
The government must spy on you ‘cuz (more-or-less chronological order,)
1) Communists
2) Hippies
3) Pornographers
4) Kiddie Pornographers
5) Islamic Terrorists
6) Russian Trolls
7) White Nationalists
When so many disparate problems all have same solution, one starts to wonder whether the goal is to solve problems, or to implement the desired “solution.”
My vote for what they really want is the “desired solution”.
It sure as hell won’t solve any of those problems, so… yeah.
What CAN be done WILL be done by those who have the power, and are not presented with any meaningful opposition, or without any restraint that they can’t overcome.
Beware the Patriot-Scoundrels.
If only there were an opposition party that would do more than use this for campaign rhetoric.
Evil Nazi-type authoritarians will always be with us.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
—Yeats
“Article [III] (Amendment 3 – Quartering Soldiers)
“No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”
The solution is the quartering of soldiers, or militarized police, or their electronic eavesdropping surrogates, in homes of citizens.
Only Big Brother can save us.
This can be accomplished by Repeal Amendment 3, or by Congressional declaration of war, or by declaration that we do not live “in time of peace”.
A sure cure for a headache is decapitation.
But surely this cure is worse than the disease.
Unless my math is off, in just a few days–Sept. 12, 2019–those young people who will become able to vote will be the first ones who have spent their entire lives in the post-9/11 America. These are the children for whom shoesearches at the airport as a talisman to prevent “bad things” (TM) and continual subway announcements about how backpacks are subject to police search are simply part of the normal background noise. I suppose a hundred years ago, people looked up and muttered, “Damned airplanes, sputtering across the sky.”
An acquaintance from France observes that over there, armed soldiers are on the streets.
It really does seem like everything’s speeding up as we get closer to the finish line, doesn’t it? The economy is becoming more and more brittle. The msm exhausts itself on yap-dog coverage of the Dow (down 800 points!!!!!1!. In three days, when it’s back where it was a week ago? Never an admission of the idiocy of the entire exercise or a discourse on real economic issues). And when not covering distraction non-stories, the msm is actively and openly engaging in dirty tricks against Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile, at the border, the concentration camps are going up. The interconnectedness between creepy billionaires and creepy politicians grows stronger with every ejaculation, and it becomes harder and harder to countersuggest against all the conspiracy talk-talk. In 10 years, will I be sitting in my “relocation studio” arguing with Ted (a couple of cells over) about whether the anti-vaxxers were on to something?. Will we have a catchy theme tune to the coverage of the 25th year of the war in Iraq? Will anyone finally admit that soldiers who are liberating people don’t get PTSD? That you get that from doing or witnessing something horrific that you, somehow, had an active part in?
I recall James Baldwin’s lament (published in 1963) in “The Fire Next Time”:
” It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it.”
Everything really does seem to be going straight to hell. I wish I could be more invested in everything NOT going straight to hell.
The trick seems to be on THE VAST MAJORITY of the 330 million ‘Murcans who thought their 400 million guns would prevent “the government tyranny” that, curiously(?), has been escalating right along with gun sales.
Strangely enough, those who complain most vociferously about “big government” are the same who want the government in your bedroom, doctor’s office, church, and bathroom.
But the good news is that you don’t have to buy a trigger lock. MAGA!
The trick on a small majority is that it believes that showing displeasure against government actions (such as in peaceful marches) is sufficient to awaken government to their “inadvertent” monstrous behavior.
The only reason we have been spared WW III up to this point is that the state organizers of war have found themselves on the future front lines of the next nuclear world war after the event of August 6, 1945.
Nobel was wrong that his invention of dynamite made war too terrible to contemplate.
Maybe an Oppenheimer Peace Prize should be initiated while we are on our sprint to the finish line.
Never underestimate the power of mass weaponry to bring a semblance of peace, a peace as terrible, blasphemous, and tasteless as that we have substituted for real peace in our submission to tyrannical governments.
“Ain’t nuthin’ more peaceful than a dead man”
– Fearless Fosdick. (I think…)
> armed soldiers are on the streets.
Yeah. I’m old enough to remember the “newpapers” running “photographs” of “communist” soldiers brandishing machine guns on street corners. But at that time, it was considered a bad thing. My, how times change.
> down 800 points
Yep. I’m living off my IRA nowadays. It took a big dive at the first of the year & never recovered. Big hit yesterday as well. But the good news is that the 1% got a big tax break, so “the economy is doing well”
One of the many things that make R’s worse than Dems, when the R’s ram something through they are not afraid to repeal the law/regulation in a lame duck session not to give the D’s a chance to use the law against their backers.
The Dems are no paragons of virtue, they would pass a similar law if they could. The Dem’s would say they need it to combat right wing hate groups but the temptation to listen in to other groups would too great, the mission would just keep expanding…..The Dem’s are not brazen enough to pass a law for use only when they are in the majority and repeal it at the last minute, so if they pass something expect the R’s to twist it to the right as soon as get back in the drivers seat.