Monday, December 12, 2005

Tinfoil hats?. Politick.info. Despite the rogue title, this is a good summary of system disruption by Gus. Let's talk a little about the effects of systems disruption on a country like England. First, the moral effect of such attacks is ambiguous at... [John Robb's Weblog] From the quoted article: Unlike high value symbolic targets, such as the World Trade Center or London's transit system (though that's a mixed case because it has the potential to slow down business and commerce), infrastructure attacks don't usually result in the "rally around the leader" mentality in the populace. This means that the tolerance for such attacks is much lower. That's a good point. When the US attacked Serbia, their attempts to attack the Serbian military didn't accomplish much. It wasn't until Clinton ordered the military to start attacking civilian targets that the people of Serbia started to turn against President Milosevic. On the other hand, everyone involved in World War Two constantly attacked civilian targets, and it didn't have much effect on civilian support for the governments. comment () trackback ()  1:57:48 PM     Cory Maye should not die. I'VE BEEN READING RADLEY BALKO'S COVERAGE of the tragedy of Cory Maye. Maye is on death row for shooting a home-invasion burglar who turned out to be a cop smashing into his home at 11:30 at night. I should have blogged about this days ago. But some injustices leave me so stunned that I'm speechless until I can find something useful to say about them. Weirdly enough, I had just completed an article about stupidly fatal paramilitary police raids. On the day I learned about the Maye horror, that article was flatly -- even angrily -- rejected. I recently talked with criminologist Peter B. Kraska (the man who created the meme "militarizing Mayberry"). His research shows that there are about 40,000 paramilitary police raids in the U.S. each year and that some 80 percent of them are used in routine (albeit extraordinarily dramatic) service of drug-war search warrants. NOT arrest warrants, mind you. But search warrants. Police are smashing down doors in the middle of the night solely to gather evidence of possible drug activity. And all too often, they find either no drugs or some petty amount of drugs -- but leave a dead body or a shattered family behind. In Cory Maye's case, he probably wasn't even the cops' target. It appears to be another case of "mistakes were made." Or, giving the very, very most charitable interpretation, another case of absurdly sloppy (to non-existant) investigative work. But the police get the benefit of the doubt, while Maye is scheduled to get a lethal injection. Police paramilitary raids against minor, non-violent law-breakers must stop. NOW. And completely. Every, single one of them is a tragedy -- a completely unnecessary tragedy -- waiting to happen. And the very fact that police agencies are choosing -- choosing -- to violently attack citizens who have offered no hint of violence is already a tragedy for the nation and for civilization. [Wolfesblog] It seems pretty clear that not only should Mr. Maye immediately be released, but that every government employee involved in his imprisonment--police, prosecutor, judge, and jailors--should be imprisoned. comment () trackback ()  1:47:21 PM

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