"They couldn’t see the complex reality that was in front of them - because the stories they had been told about the world had become so simplified that they lacked the perceptual apparatus to see reality any longer."

Not Curtis, though. As he showed in Century of the Self, Curtis ain't fooled like the rest of us. He must have special powers.

That's all well and good, but the fact of the matter is, all cops uphold laws, many of which are simply unjust. For example, almost anything to do with the "war on drugs" makes criminals out of nonviolent offenders, ruining families, destroying lives. Cops also follow protocols that give them license to do what would land a civilian in jail, like shooting dogs at their discretion (the endless YouTube videos of this happening is nauseating). So, the profession itself involves doing things that, while "legal," are unethical and dangerous to the public.

Whatever good they may do -- bringing justice for victims and such -- is a separate issue from the not-so-good they do, like pursuing an immoral "war on drugs" that damages way too many innocent victims, destroys far too many lives, to be justified as "good." However good of a person someone is, the reality is that cops have a job that involves things like arresting and/or shooting people for victimless crimes.

The "accident" that happened in the situation in this article, for example (in which a police officer attempted to shoot a family's dog, but missed, thus killing a woman in front of her 4 year old child, instead) would never have happened if cops didn't have crazy protocols like shooting dogs at whim.

If any civilian had taken a shot at a neighbor's dog and killed the neighbor instead, however, no one would be dismissing it as an "accident." Why, then, should cops get a free pass on such things by simply claiming that their immoral and indefensible activity is "by the book?"

(Of course, the purpose of this comment is not to be hurtful to anyone. But to serve as a wake up call that police services in this country have been getting out of control, just like the rest of the state apparatus.)

True story.

Went to the presentation at school, at night. All the boys went one night, the girls on another. Fifth and sixth graders, but my mom took me as a fourth grader, my brother went as a fifth grader.

After both of us had seen the presentation, my parents sat with us in the backyard. Asked if we had any questions.

I had one. "How does the sperm get across the bed? Does it crawl?"

They showed all the apparatus, but they never told us the delivery method!

My parents didn't answer then. My dad tried to tell me later. Always at dinner time, which was weird.

I learned by then that this was something not to be discussed (picked that up from my parents, clearly!) Dad would try to tell me, I would squeal and run upstairs.

My father is not a patient man.

One night, he leaned over and unplugged the toaster. "Gale, in electrical terms, this is the male and this is the female." And he plugged in the toaster.

I squealed and ran, but the info was transmitted.

Stupid Disney movie didn't tell us.

This was in 1963.

@newtboy "The Teabaggers... infected BOTH the Republican party and the Libertarian party"

Nope. Never affiliated with the Libertarian Party.

"That seems now like you're saying 'we need stronger regulations that hold people criminally accountable for companies actions"

Of course it doesn't. Did I not say corporations are fictitious entities created by the state? Scroll up and reread, I'll wait...

...

...So apply them critical thinking and reading comprehension skills. Do you honestly still think I was saying, "We need moar government to curb corporate power given to them in the first place by government!!11!" Or maybe, if government is the apparatus that gives corporations their unfair advantages, welfare, powers and privileges, then maybe it's government's role in that that needs to be reduced. That has nothing to do with moar regulashuns!

The "spanish" guy sounds like an idiot when he pronounces it "maripotha". He is affecting a Spain accent, which makes no sense in this case because only the letter "z" and the letters "ci" and "ce" are pronounced with a SLIGHT "th" sound in some areas of Spain.

I don't want to go off on a Dennis Miller rant here but that always bugs the shit out of me. It's said quite often that people from Spain speak with a lisp, because some king back in some century had a lisp, so everyone was ordered to speak the same way. Sounds interesting, right? Sounds like some stupid myth to me. If it was a lisp then the letter "s" would be pronounced like "th".

While I'm on the subject nothing irritates me more than native English speakers who study Spanish but then speak it in their flat American or British accent. They make no effort to emulate the specific Spanish vowel and consonant sounds, it sounds moronic. But they make sure to throw in the "lisp", as if that's all it takes to sound authentic. Only they can't even manage that, they end up sounding like Daffy Duck. Usually it's college kids studying for their Bachelor's in Posing that do this crap, with a minor in Hipster Studies.

I have studied Spanish for years and I admit it takes effort to change your whole vocal apparatus to have a conversation in Spanish and maintain the accent. But otherwise why spend all that time learning a language only to speak it with your McAccent.

I don't get the applications for this. It's only effective when viewed directly through the lenses and even if the object were cloaked from all angles the apparatus itself remains uncloaked. Cool though.

jeez, there's more casual violence in the average flag football game than there were in my 30 years of LE experience.

Also, you don't use your gun as a club, get real.

Dying from pepper spray? Unlikely, but people have died from being handcuffed. I've seen dead people who died while taking a nap, people in their 30s. There is risk in everything. Kids die from choking on breakfast cereal. Whattya gonna do?

I remember picking up this dude at the county jail, had some kind of breathing apparatus on him. I put him in back of my cruiser and the a/c was barely working and wasn't reaching the back seat at all, real hot day. I'm watching him in the mirror and he's fading. I thought, good god, this guy could die back there. So I pulled off the freeway and opened the door. 'Get in the front!'. I put the vents on him and he started coming around and before long we were talking football.
Of course, you won't see any video of that.

There is no doubt that these people are disgusting, but thankfully they are also rare. Every society has their fringe crazies - the US has Westboro Baptist Church, for instance - and they generally get way more attention than they deserve by being controversial.

This isn't to say that there isn't a problem with Israeli society's attitude toward the Palestinians, it's just to say that I think it is a problem that is far more subtle and widespread. Focusing so much attention on a small percentage of religious fanatics can be important because it does represent a movement and ideology that is problematic, but it has very little direct relevance to the current conflict.

The real problem, in my opinion, is a unique mixture of nationalism and a lopsided insulation from the reality of the conflict that is very common in Israeli society.

Israeli society is uniquely coherent in a particular way that stems from the relatively homogenous cultural identity facilitated by Judaism, and this coherence is also strengthened by the fact that Israeli society was built in the face of and as a direct result of considerable adversity. I think that this does allow for a sort of groupthink that inhibits Israel's ability to treat the Palestinians in a humane manner, but the effect manifests itself through society as a sort of cultural blindness and it manifests through the political process as hawkish policy.

(Also, whether or not you think they had the right to build that society in the first place is beside the point right now, I'm only talking about the existence of the unifying influence of adversity, and the effect it has on policy and the national psyche)

The other component of it is the simple fact that Israelis are extremely insulated from the realities of the Palestinian sufferings.

Even in the heat of a conflict like this, Israelis can pretty much go about their lives unimpeded. It is true that the rocket attacks are disruptive and that there is on a whole an unacceptably high level of danger from external attacks, but Israelis have leveraged a security apparatus that minimizes these realities in day to day life to an astounding degree, all things considered, and this fact is a double edge sword that creates a perfect breeding ground for indifference.

One side of the sword is that these measures are extremely effective at improving the lives of Israelis in the short term. However the other side of the sword is that it obviously makes these measures popular and politically successful. Furthermore, with all the calm and prosperity, it is very easy to forget about the abysmal conditions being imposed on 1.8 million people just thirty kilometers or so from your doorstep. The only time they really have to deal with the issue is when there is an inevitable flareup of violence at which point, naturally, people tend to be less empathetic. The rest of the time, during the lulls, the prospect of empathy is just placed on the back burner.

These are the tendencies that need to be addressed.

However calling Israel the 4th Reich and placing so much focus on youtube videos that give Israel's religious fanatics undue prominence is just as useless and destructive as all the Israelis and Israel sympathizers who insist on viewing Palestinian society as an unchanging, violent monolith that is accurately represented by its extremist elements.

The fact of the matter is that there are significant movements within Israeli society that are in fact attempting to change these trends. The same is true of Palestinian society, however it is more difficult for those movements because of the repressions imposed by Hamas, culture and environment.

If there is to be any hope in this situation, Israel's role as the dominant, occupying force means that they have the first move. They will have to shift from focusing on isolation and self-preservation to one of empathy to the average Palestinian, an empathy that is so strong that they must be willing to take considerable personal risks and let up their stranglehold on Palestinian society and allow them to prosper.

Because only then will the environment be in any way conducive for Palestinians to take considerable personal risks and defy the status quo en masse. Only then will the false succor of violent religious extremism loose its appeal.

Until that happens, we'll the cycle seems to return to square one every two or three years and I expect to have this discussion again sometime around 2017.

Unfortunately, it is going to be a hard and unlikely road because it takes a lot of empathy and effort to rise up and take huge risks during the times of quiet when prosperity and security easily distract from the continuing plight of the Palestinians. These aren't common traits. Humans are a very tribal species and we're not good at this kind of stuff when it concerns someone different who you don't have to interact with. This challenge is hardly unique to the Jews.

Australia for arguments sake, but your assumption that my post was about one upping the US is incorrect.

I find the situation sad when so many people are so poorly treated by a system and yet still perpetuate that system. You mention not being able to play a game due to a lack of freedom, but how is that an issue compared to not getting medical or dental care for a child? Access to life saving drugs without mortgaging not only your own future, but the future of your kids. Oh woo-fucking-hoo, you can buy the handful of games our censors knocked on the head, but you can't feed your homeless or pay your retired police/firefighters pensions. You can't guarantee a living wage for huge swathes of the population so a few people can have even larger money vaults. Your security apparatus crawls through your vaunted rights at will, and convinces the populace that the guy shining a light on just how undermined US freedom really is, is a traitor...

If all I was concerned about is feeling superior, I could stop right there, mission accomplished.

But it's not. It's fucking sick that so many people eek out shitty existences for the protection and perpetuation of a tiny portion of the population. Feudalism at least was honest, you were born in the dirt and you died in the dirt.

American's are, from my experience, just people like everyone else. For the most part, wonderful people. I've met so many great people on my travels to the US. They deserve better, they fought and bled and worked for better. So how is it most never even get close?

It's not about who's better, or more fortunate, or who's national dick is collectively longer. It's about giving good people a fair chance rather than the so called 'representatives' conspiring to stack the game against them.

I feel I do need to dial my earlier post back a bit. I feel as though I'm unfairly blaming all republicans for this sort of behavior.

The reality is that plenty of Republicans think this sort of thing is nonsense too. The problem is not the republicans, it's Fox News...they are the propaganda arm. It's not all Republicans, Its one group of republicans who are in control of a massively large media apparatus and they are using it to push a narrative. There was a TYT video about this situation too where Cenk blasted Hannity for constantly pushing the rancher to agree with him...instead of..you know..asking him questions and actually interviewing him? Hannity was trying to guide the discussion towards one path and the rancher resisted until Hannity pushed the same narrative for the 3rd time until the rancher gave in and just echoed him.

propaganda.

Not that many people actually agree with Hannity's/Fox's agenda, but they cloak it in the flag of faux patriotism and they know their demographic are poor, old, white scared people and it's so so very easy to pull those puppet strings.

People that give a fuck about the true direction of the planet who like to blabber-on ad-naseum about which news corp is their favorite and which one is full of morons, and if you like them well then you must be a moron, or (insert meaningless label here) are the most gullible, the most extremely out-of-touch with what's truly going on. They have let their minds become a sponge for distraction and illusion by the very machine that rapes the planet of human and natural resources for personal gain and consolidation of power.

The mind is a terrible thing to waste on feeding the very machine that enslaves us all.

As a simple example of just how secondary oil would be as a universal commodity you need only to look at who controls the access. If we'd gone the direction of the Bucky Fullers and Teslas that pop-into the grid in every epoch, and shared collectively in a similar mind and vision, people who pick winners and losers would be non-existent or self-aware, and the real criminals on the planet posing as so-called leaders would be raving in asylums or extinct by now.

Why won't the planet use nuclear energy correctly and righteously for example...SAFE power from the atomic components that make up the experiential world?? Because assholes and criminals run the show. Period.

Same with oil. Same with slavery through economic monopoly, same with the mind-control apparatus that force-feeds the gullible their world views based on their insidious, contrived models.

There are way better drugs out there than politics kids......Use your fucking brains?!

Chomsky has a poor understanding of economics with reference to things like economic calculation, for example. He does not see/understand the mechanisms of a free market that would make anarchism possible and thus keep it from turning into chaos. Maybe from a metaphysical perspective, as in karma, we get what [government] we deserve, but we should nonetheless strive to overcome our bad karma, and do good deeds such as getting rid of the need to impose on others through the state apparatus.

And here I thought the claims around his four laptops were put to rest in July of last year or, at the very latest, after his meeting with Ray MacGovern, Jesselyn Radack and Thomas Drake in October.

There was nothing of substance on those laptops and to suggest otherwise with any credibility demands extraordinary proof.

Why?

Because of two primary reasons, as far as I am concerned:

- Any of Snowden's claims has yet to proven false. The entire apparatus is trying and they failed miserably so far. Probably because Snowden actually knows what he's talking about, unlike such cranks as Rep. Peter King.

- Snowden spent years working within the intelligence industry (CIA, NSA, private contractors) and he has proven to be careful and meticulous. Unlike the public (or the British MoD), he'd know better than to transport any sensitive information on a device like a laptop or a smartphone. Or an external harddrive. Or a disk. He'd use flash memory, possibly a thumb drive, probably an SD card -- the less embedded controllers a device has, the better. Heavily encrypted, of course, and if anyone doesn't believe that crypto works... tough luck, I'm done trying to convince people otherwise.

So, the only people who received data from him are Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. American journalists reporting on American issues, just like he said.

As for the the revelation of "tons of national secrets and techniques": he has revealed nothing. Let me say that again: Snowden has revealed nothing.

He has empowered members of the press, the fourth estate, to do their bloody jobs and fullfil their role as watchdog over the government, something they failed at miserably in this particular regard. All revelations happen at the discretion of those journalists who are now the sole proprietors of the Snowden-documents.

If, however, you don't subscribe to the notion of a free press as a line of defence against government abuse, then I can't change your mind.

By the way, "putting American lives at risk" should have received a trademark by now, the way it has been waved around to kill uncomfortable conversations. I vividly remember how desperate they were to find proof that the Afghan/Iraqi War Logs and the Gitmo Files were endangering lives. As far as I know, they never found any. And as far as I know, all releases based on Snowden-documents were carefully chosen and redacted where neccessary to protect the identity of human assets. All claims to the contrary need to provide evidence.

But I'm glad to see that the "American industry" has found its way into the argument. At least we don't have to pretend that this is solely about terrorism anymore. Industrial espionage, diplomatic advantages and... keeping your own population in check.

Yay! It's just like the old days.

Oh wait, I forgot. My country has been under full scale surveillance by the US, the British and the French since the late '40s, so it's actually business as usual.

There's a simpler way of looking at mental illness or the lack of true freedom, in all her hydratic forms-Religions' a way to get a shitload of peeps to render their souls and Krugerrandz unto Caesar-like entities like preachers, priests, and governments.

What one makes for and of themselves with which to add to the grid, is all that matters in this lifetime-After this world comes pure energy and the bread you've cast comes around again-Make any sense there, god little gee?? True spirituality is coming to grips with time, space, and matter and the influence your perceptive apparatus has on the whole.