If you want to grasp how deeply and perversely warped by punitive authoritarian propaganda [View all]
Last edited Sun Nov 2, 2014, 05:23 PM - Edit history (2)
this nation has become...
...just consider that we now find ourselves (in a deeply politically corrupted nation that already imprisons - increasingly for PROFIT - more people than any other nation in the world) .... at a place of "debating" and humoring arguments...
...about whether it's a good idea to throw people in JAIL for not mowing their lawns.
Good god. Dog help us. I'm reminded of that jaw-dropping thread about a year ago when familiar authoritarian voices here were fervently advocating jailing people who toss a cigarette butt in the gutter. Yes, that was a real "discussion," too.
How does authoritarianism happen? Bit by bit, step by step, through changing people's thinking and gradually shifting what they perceive as normal and acceptable in terms of government use of punishment, its scope and purview. In corporate propaganda and the inevitable parroting of its poison, we are steadily acclimated to the idea of police state-style tactics of dealing with citizens, down to the most mundane matters. We are constantly invited to discuss, in utter seriousness and with great respect for the opposing arguments....expansions of our government's use of one of its most extreme powers:
Now it's for not mowing your lawn.
Think about that. Think about what that really means, and what kind of society you are asking for when you even humor these "arguments" justifying this garbage. We do not entertain "serious" and "rational" debates about the pros and cons of killing and eating small children. Yet every time we hear of an American being locked up for a new reason that would have left our grandparents open-mouthed, there are serene authoritarian voices inviting us to "discuss" it, to see both sides...to normalize it.
And this sick way of thinking now darkens, pervades, and pollutes conversations ranging from whether we really need our fundamental Constitutional rights and protections to how we should deal with the crabgrass down the road.
It is a *way of thinking,* and it is being bred and nurtured in us. And it is sick and perverse, no matter how much the oh-so-reasonable voices will assure you that it isn't. No, the observation that unmowed and untended lawns make neighborhoods look ugly does not (in any sane society) lead rationally to the conclusion that failing to mow a lawn therefore justifies locking up human beings.
The truth is that lots of other more enlightened countries don't do this. Their citizens don't automatically think this way. They don't view every civil nuisance and disagreement, every problem that arises in a civil context, as a trigger to call in the government to criminalize it, to punish, to lock someone up. They handle these things in other ways.
We are taught not even to conceive of other possible ways. Ways like engaging community to solve the problem, or even reconsidering how we are interpreting a "problem."
It doesn't have to be this way. Slow introduction of authoritarian thinking...that what we dislike ought therefore to be punished...is how a police state is slowly normalized.
I am really starting to think at this point that we need a live streaming feed of how people in, say, Norway or Sweden talk about problems like this. We need something to give this nation some perspective, to help us step out of this sick propaganda matrix, the FOX News, MSM, punitive daily messaging we marinate in...to see how perverse this thinking really is.
This shouldn't even be a discussion, folks. Reject the authoritarian voices. Watch the patterns, and reject the propaganda.
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