Wednesday, March 18, 2009

What I read

I haven't forgotten about the other stuff I intended to write about, but there's is only so much time per day. One of the things I want to do is highlight the other bloggers I read. First up is Ed Brayton at Dispatches From the Culture Wars. He goes first not because he's the best or anything, but because he wrote something I want to link to.

Media Focuses on Irrelevancies in GVSU Shooting

Here's the short version: Cops do a marijuana raid and apparently shoot an unarmed college student for no good reason, but won't talk about it. Presumably, if they had a good reason, they would talk about it. Rather than address the details of the warrant or what happened, police talk about how the victim was a druggie. News reports just quote the police and do no actual critical analysis of the situation. I think Ed summed it up well. This is, in a very real way, the equivalent of talking about what a rape victim was wearing. Unless we're shooting stoners now, none of this is relevant.

I've been hangign otu with hippies lately (more on this later) and many basically regard the police as armed criminals running an extortion racket. I can see the necessity of police and even understand that when you give anyone the power to shoot people if they have good reason, this will inevitably lead to them occasionally shooting people without good reason. However, this must be minimized and the first step to minimizing the problem is calling bullshit on this sort of thing. While it's important to understand that accidents will happen, it's even more important to understand that using this as an excuse leads to more accidents that get less accidental.

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