Athenae, Terrorism

On Police States

Show me what a police state looks like?

I’m on record any number of times saying that Godwin’s Law is a law for a reason, and that Hitler is like Hitler and pretty much nobody else is like Hitler. If you’re going to call somebody a Nazi, they’d better be invading Poland.

So no, Chicago is not like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia this morning. But it is possible to hold in our minds the idea that this is not in fact an actual police state, and also that “Not Soviet Russia” is not, shall we say, the highest standard to which we should aspire.

Andthe comments to this piece are typical of what I’ve been reading all over the place this weekend:

Love those blue helmets! Reminds me of the 60’s and 70’s when the CPD pounded the scum down. Glad to see tham do it quite well again.

Commuters! Run them over with your cars. And at the same time lower the unemployment rating.

Charming.

A.

6 thoughts on “On Police States”

  1. Sorry, unrelated but WTF? Scott Walker has hired a “deer czar” who thinks hunting on public lands isthe last bastion of communism? He thinks hunting on private game farms alone should be allowed?
    Seriously, he’s going after the hunting constituency now? That isn’t a police state, that’s positively FEUDAL.

  2. SB, that guy’s whole kink is private deer farms, which … if you can’t kill yourself a deer, like if you have to make that EASIER by penning them up before you kill them, you should not be handling ammunition of any kind.
    A.

  4. You know honestly, after the Reagan landslide (back in the day), I decided it was time to face the fact that my fellow Americans are fascists. Not good people duped into bigotry by their rulers, but the real thing on their own.
    That was also when I bought every Hannah Arendt title I could get my hands on. I wanted to hear from someone who had also been on the inside while her country made a hard swing to the dark side.

  5. A.:
    I know of very few actual sportsmen who approve of that kind of canned hunting. That’s the balliwick of rich assholes like Dick Cheney and John Rich, who have more ego than sense. Most hunters find such things appalling and un-sportsman-like.
    Of course, the guy’s whole thing makes no sense. The argument for allowing hunting on public lands has always been for “wildlife management.” Lack of predators and all that, you gotta thin the herd somehow. So who’s gonna do it if everyone has been shoved off into for-profit game farms?
    This makes no sense.

  6. “You know honestly, after the Reagan landslide (back in the day), I decided it was time to face the fact that my fellow Americans are fascists… That was also when I bought every Hannah Arendt title I could get my hands on.”
    And then you grew up like most of us do, and realized you were a typical undergraduate drama queen, right?

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