Police are not good enforcers for Martial Law. Do they serve an over-purpose?
On Friday, November 11, Police in Davis California used pepper spray to quell a quiet group of students participating in the current nation-wide protests.
This never works. In the 1960’s and ’70’s police in Chicago, Alabama and elsewhere, tried it and radicalized a generation of people and split our society in half; a split that has not healed even today. Force should be used to stop mob violence, riots that damage and endanger the social fabric. If this is a martial law situation, then the Army should be called in. Military population control protocols should be declared and enforced; protocols similar to what we impose on Iraq and Afghanistan. Do we have riots currently threatening political big guys, innocent bystanders or properties that need such intervention? … not yet
Police pepper spray quells violent riot at UC Davis
Here is a frame from one of the many videos taken at that event. This is from a New York Times report. The police are shown to casually spray sitting, passive people as though they were spraying caterpillars in a garden.
For people with respiratory issues, this could be life threatening. For people with just asthma, it could be months for recovery. Spray normal healthy people with pepper spray and they develop cold, flu or sinusitis type symptoms that take weeks to get over.
In this video, the brave cop sprays the people sitting with linked arms, bending over to be sure he hits their faces. He does a second pass to assure compete coverage. Then a second very brave cop sprays this violent destructive mob of crazies from the rear and heroically assures 360º coverage. Why not just take these people in and perform partial-death procedures like the water board partial-drowning?
Agonizing force was used; was this really a martial law situation? For a society to operate well, martial law should be declared with caution. Was it needed at Kent State (way back when)? My favorite quotation is from Adm. Wm. Adama: “The Army fights the enemy of the people. When the Army becomes the police, the people become the enemy.” This is an injunction: do not declare martial law except when extreme force is justified, as with an armed revolt.
LastTechAge has much appearance of a technology blog. But, its actual goal is to identify what happened in the past to get us to our technically decayed state and point out paths we should follow to avoid losing capability as a people. My focus is on the my own country, the United States, because human technical development would not disappear were we to accomplish a social sea-change. It would move to new centers of excellence, perhaps China and India?
This pepper spray incident is a sign of our times. My deep fear – Could the goal not have been to halt a serious insurrection movement, but to foment one? This may be an inflammatory accusation, but the 2012 political rhetoric has been filled with secessionist destroy America allusions; kill the beast. Sometimes candidates compete on who makes the most seditious statements, the most powerful incite-to-riot rhetoric. (An example is Sara Palin and Glenn Beck’s pictures with target grids over the images. Palin and Beck are not candidates, so they were free to be more than seditious. They actually solicited murder.) Have we entered a new direction in American politics? We appear to be in a new attack on national unity by the same home-grown forces that have operated for the past several generations.
Two generations ago, the US was the world powerhouse in new technologies. Are we now being maneuvered into dissolving our Union? Once broken into small principalities we would not be capable of coherent technical development. Once this happened, there would be no point in posts like these about loss of our astrophysical presence, our fusion energy competence, our front-line testing of the foundations of our universe, nor even, biotechnology and medical advances. As a continent of separated states, there would be no such capability.
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Charles J. Armentrout, Ann Arbor
2011 Nov 21 minor typo corrections: Nov 26
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