lacking all sense of irony

[realthog]

I've just read the latest tickertape headline on the BBC website:

EGYPT UNREST:
US State Department condemns 'excessive force' used by Egyptian police against protesters

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Yep.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

It amazes me that even the US State Department should be so blinkered as not to realize this application of double standards. Were they perhaps hoping that turning the heat on another (and obviously very blameworthy) regime would somehow make us all forget what US police are doing to US citizens?

Possibly, I hate to say, yes. The attention span of many of the US public is notoriously short (poisoned water supplies? lemme get a banner! oh, hold that: Kim Kardashian's on the box). I have the very strong sense, though, that just over the past few months many Americans -- thanks in no small part to Occupy Wall Street -- have at last begun to pay attention to their world.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I do hope so.
They do the same here, mind you: the behaviour of Cameron over Libya springs to mind.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

the behaviour of Cameron over Libya springs to mind

I know very little about this. Please elucidate.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, it was the usual. All in favour of supporting Libyan insurgents, lending army advisers, visiting to 'support' the opposition... Then protests at home over cuts and out comes the anti-popular rhetoric about 'lazy' students, the unemployed, people who don't *understand* etc etc.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

That sounds pretty familiar. We were in the UK when the riots were happening, and actually in Heathrow waiting to go home when the news came over the telly of Cameron's long-awaited response. I simply could not believe how stupid it was. Anyone more intelligent than a Brussels sprout -- and a particularly stupid Brussels sprout at that -- would have realized the political sense of admitting up-front the possibility that the government had got some things wrong and should do a bit of thinking, dum-de-dum, whether or not they actually meant it.

But not Playgirl centre-spread Cameron. All he could do was sputter about how the rioters would be [drop voice to the level of the guy who does the voiceovers for movie trailers] da-da-da-dum punished as severely as the law permitted. It sounded like something a school prefect would propose as a solution to subversive talk in the lavs.

[ogre-san.livejournal.com]

Yesssss. Cheers to the Arab Spring. Now we need a USA Spring.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

We have between now and the end of the year to make it the US Fall various commentators speculated about.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Why, yes.

Love, C.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Me, I can't understand why Obama isn't very loudly saying the police repression, USA-style, must stop forthwith. It'd cost him exactly zero political capital -- quite the contrary, it'd likely be a vote-winner. And it'd perhaps restore some small modicum of respect to the US in the eyes of the world.

Stringing up many of the most egregious criminals on Wall Street, their counterparts in Congress, and of course several of the more obviously bought members of the Supreme Court would have a similar effect, but I don't expect him to see eye-to-eye with me on this.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Because he's one of them. Wall Street is giving him tons of money.

He's what one might have called some time in the past a right of the middle conservative Rethug. He's done everything asked to increase the police state.

The question is why Obama isn't opposing the the crazies, the question is why we're seeing, finally, a movement that eschews both the dope dems and the rethugs. Answer: because they are the same.

Love, C.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

I know the point you're making, except that I'd class him as a moderate Repug, not a "right of the middle conservative" one -- which is still to say that, in most other western democracies, he'd be well to the right of centre.

But that wasn't really what I was talking about. What I can't understand is why, as a savvy politician, he's not loudly denouncing the police violence: it's something that would gain him a lot of political capital -- not just here but abroad (you of all people, dear one, will know the damage this is doing to us internationally) -- and cost him nothing.

[monissaw.livejournal.com]

It's OK until you actually start killing them? Meh.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

The US cops may already be there: the pregnant girl who was peppersprayed and kicked the other day has since miscarried. Obviously the cause-and-effect is impossible to prove for certain, but the savage mistreatment to which she was subjected can hardly have helped.

Of course, US cops are killing people in other circumstances all the time, and most often the US populace decides to be in denial about it. Every now and then there's a moment of public outrage over some particularly egregious case, but that lasts just long enough until the next episode of Survivors . . . and not even that long if the victim is black, which he usually is.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for a weapon like pepper spray to be in the armory of US cops. It's an artifact whose description on the label tells you it's designed for the infliction of intense pain -- in other words, it's a torture device. Why the hell anyone had a mind so depraved as to invent the stuff in the first place, who knows; but putting into the hands of supposed law-enforcement officers was an act of complete lunacy, because there is absolutely no valid occasion for them to be using it.

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

Hypocrites, much? It's OK if WE do it? But it's bad if THEY do it? Bah!

[realthog.livejournal.com]

It's OK if WE do it? But it's bad if THEY do it?

That's exactly the message we're sending to the world. And then we get poltroons like Il Buce saying, "They hate us for our freedoms." In fact, "they" hate us for lots of reasons, and some of those reasons are bigoted and vile, but some are more understandable . . . one being that we bellow to the world we're kind and benevolent and good while in fact doing many things so ghastly even Kim Jong Il would think twice.