Originally posted to my Tripod Blog on 27 October 2007 at 10:57 PM EDT
On one of my other blogs ("The Green Tortoise and Other Travesties"), in regard to the present day Burning Man, I wrote "now, the kids wrap blinky lights around their go-carts and we wonder how long it will be before somebody draws a bead on them because he thinks that the go carts must be bombs. If you think that's an exaggeration, check out these videos from the Youtube user winsleuth - oh, and before the rumor mill gets going again, no, I'm not him either.
If you're tuning in very, very late and are wondering what on earth this could possibly be about, here's the story as it is known now: An MIT student named Star Simpson was headed to a job fair, and on her way dropped by Logan International to pick up her boyfriend, who was on an inbound flight. She had assembled an electronic id badge which made a visual pun on her name - it showed a blinking star. There was nothing to it but a few LEDs, a simple circuit board and a battery. An airport employee saw it, went into hysterics and for no particularly good reason, decided that what she was seeing had to be a bomb. As one can see for oneself, just by looking at the photo in this news story, that conclusion was absurd
but, as Barnum once allegedly observed, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The unfortunate undergrad found herself surrounded by trigger happy Massachussetts state troopers who, in the middle of a crowded airport, had machine guns drawn and trained on her for the heinous crime of wearing a blinking name tag. The representative of the state police, a man by the name of Pare, far from being decently ashamed and embarassed over the fact that he and his men had endangered an innocent girl and every innocent bystander who would have been caught in the crossfire after recoil had inevitably thrown off the shots being fired at what would have been the girl's soon to be lifeless body, actually bragged about the near brush his men had with the commission of an act of reckless homicide.
The spin given by the prosecutor, who at the time of this writing is actually trying to put the student in prison, is that the blinky badge was a fake bomb, even though it didn't look like one and wasn't presented as one. Most of the professional news media - at least those I've seen tape from - seem to have presented only the spin, left out the photos and other awkward details. (Disclaimer: I came across this story late, and can't yet be certain that the footage I've seen hasn't been selectively edited by third parties). The prevailing view among bloggers and those commenting on blogs has seemed to have been that the student deserved to die for not psychically knowing that the employee would leap to the bizarre conclusion that she did, and that in any case, the actual facts regarding what it was that she actually wore were beside the point in determining her guilt or innocence.
The word for today is "kafkaesque". What is being proposed is a standard of justice that no country can adopt, if that country is to evolve into anything but a totalitarian state. I'll probably write more about this later.
Originally posted to my Tripod Blog on October 7, 2007 at 2:02 EDT
On the title article for the Green Tortoise and Other Travesties. I wrote "I want to write "can you imagine our surprise ... but I think that I know the answer to that question" - which you probably can if you've watched the news at any time in the last few years. "Don't Taze me, bro" ... right? By the way, if you haven't witnessed that gem of an incident, a few views of it
are worth a few million lines of spin.
By the way - notice how Kerry kept on talking in response to the questions asked, even as the man is getting tasered, as if nothing was happening. Not a word about it, not even "officers, is that really necessary"; considering what a president will have to deal with in office, wouldn't you want one to have a little more of a presence than the robotic one we saw up on that podium? If one can't go off one's script and handle a situation well enough to deal with a few unruly rent-a-cops, just how well is one going to be able to handle a real crisis? Or worse, what would it say about him if he looked at what was happening before him, and saw nothing questionable about it, nothing that merited the asking of a few questions? What, for that matter, is just that reaction telling us about so many of our own people?
When somebody's act of crying out for help is referred to as "resisting arrest" and he is electroshocked into silence in response, and the response of his countrymen is to either creatively cut the tape to make the response of the authorities look more reasonable as it was or to laugh about the man's cries of pain as if they were the funniest thing imaginable, and keep going back to this wonderful joke over the weeks that followed, my question about the charades incident mentioned in that post on my other blog has been answered. Of course you can imagine such an incident happening, but I should consider myself extremely fortunate if more than a small handful of you can see why some of us would find it objectionable, which illustrates why one reason why petty despotism is worth opposing - because its acceptance conditions people to not resist when worse comes along.
Not that the pettiness is always so petty. In the course of the clearly unreasonable and unconstitutional search I and my classmates were subjected to, one of us was found to have an unopened beer bottle, and Chicago's finest threatened to press charges against him for underaged drinking if any of us objected. Today, they probably would have gotten a more confrontational response out of any of us, but as used as we were to the notion that when one saw the police on duty during the night, that the sight of them was reason to feel more safe instead of less, we were too stunned to respond. Our player of charades was hauled off and we never saw him again.
That's what life in Chicago was already getting to be about, and for many of us, in the years that followed, it certainly didn't get any more free. If anything, maybe a lot less so, because while my class was being stepped on by those in power, at least the thought did occur to us that authority was being abused and that this wasn't the natural order of things. Today's freshmen, if they ever harbor such thoughts, seldom show any signs of having them. Indeed, Postmodernism being what it is, one might well wonder how they'd even conceptualize the idea of having a reasonable objection to how somebody was using his power. We are left, in such a conceptual world, with the inability to formulate an objection to a free-for-all that, with only the mildest irony, fails to provide freedom to much of anybody.
Some, when they read the words "recovering libertarian" on the side panel of my journal at Blogger, will think "oh, a former would-be corporate shill", and while that's certainly what Libertarianism has tended to degenerate into during the outsourcing and downsizing eras, that isn't what it was in years past. It used to be something that came out of the recognition that far more often than not, government and other authority was nothing more than the biggest bully on the block, not motivated by anything more than the sheer joy that would come from abusing one's power in order to prove to oneself and others than one had it, and that bullies ought not be any more empowered than necessary. If one wishes to argue, as some have, that Libertarianism has hijacked Conservatism, it is equally true that Opportunism has hijacked Libertarianism; our variety came with the recognition that there was such a thing as the individual's duty to his fellow man. We just didn't think that we needed the government to act as our supervisor when we carried out that duty.
This image from my site at DeviantArt used to qualify, but some tweaking later, I'm not sure that it still does. (The image links back to my gallery on that site).
Looking at that first post, and then taking a look at the blog I ended up uploading elsewhere (the one that was going to occupy this space), I think that you can see what the problem would have been - the print is small. Imagine going through a medium length essay like this. Yet, as Wordpress itself explains, one doesn't have the option to increase text size, and the attempt to circumvent that lack of an option will tend to leave one with one line of text overlapping the next.
Yes, this was a very foolish oversight on the part of the developers, who apparently never thought about the possibility of anybody over thirty reading a blog, but I do know that much of my readership falls well into that category (gosh, do people live that long), and so I have to think about that. At least one person I can think of seems to have circumvented the problem by redoing the CSS, but I don't have the time or the patience with the subject matter needed to learn CSS at this time, so what, as somebody who'd like to use this service without torturing his readers, should I do?
Craft my material to meet the quirks of this blog. What I'll have here will be material that emphasises visual content and keeps text to a minimum. I am playing around with photography and have set up a flickr membership, so maybe that should suggest a good use for this blog.
If you entered my sites and groups from a webring via Joseph Dunphy's Myopic Midnight Special or its homepage on Atspace, you should see a navbar for your ring below. If you don’t, that’s probably because either Webring.com has merged some more rings or because you entered my sites somewhere else; in either case, just go to the ring return page for this site and you should find that your problems are over.
At least, the Webring.com related ones.
[No ring memberships, yet. More later, when there is enough content present to justify a ring application]
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