Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Alan Brings the Snark

And it's weapon-grade, friends.
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5 comments:

wally said...

Weapons-grade indeed. Also firing that weapon wildly off target. People who like to casually toss off the "police state" epithet should spend a few weeks in a real police state. An incident like this would never have made headlines in such a place. Snarking is most effective when it reveals an underlying truth. In this case, it just reveals the illogical paranoia of the snarker.

5/20/2011 11:17:00 AM
Bob said...

@wally: I take it you have read some of the news stories on this case? If it took place in a vacuum, your charge of "illogical paranoia" might be relevent, but there have been enough instances of police abuse documented in places like Reason Magazine and Radley Balko's Agitator blog to make we believe we're dealing with a pattern of behavior.

5/20/2011 11:31:00 AM
wally said...

Never thought I'd be defending the police to you, Robert. No question that police abuse occurs. How much it occurs, how insidious a "pattern of behavior" it is, is something we can debate. But a police state? Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, 1984, V for Vendetta--those were police states. Any country where you're allowed to say any nutball thing you want on a blog is not a police state.

5/20/2011 10:13:00 PM
Bob said...

@wally: So it's just a question of semantics, and you object to Alan's hyperbolic description? I thought that might be the case (see, I occasionally figure out one of your points!)

Gun owners have an uneasy relationship with police. We usually have a law-and-order mindset and support law enforcement, but realize that, if Liberal Utopia was achieved and guns were banned, the police would be the ones going from house to house searching for illegal guns (after the voluntary turn-in period, of course).

5/21/2011 03:55:00 AM
wally said...

When you say "semantics" I know by now you mean "mere semantics". But words are important, and their misuse pollutes the public discourse. Hyperbole can be a negative operator, whether it's Democratic politicians claiming that meddling with Medicare will "kill old people", or gun nuts claiming we live in a police state.

5/21/2011 10:54:00 AM

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