America the free? Just a brief contemplation on the direction that institutional violence appears to be running nowadays. A high court has ruled it is illegal to dance at federal monuments, and several persons have been forcefully arrested for doing so at the Jefferson Memorial. Meanwhile, in Florida, it’s a crime to feed the homeless; more arrests. For the first time, police organizations are now domestically using military drones to surveil and make arrests. How this doesn’t violate the Posse Comititatus Act, I am not sure. The police don’t have a great track record of employing military tactics and hardware against civilians. Of course, if your rights are violated, you can always try asking for a complaint form and see how well that turns out.
On the other hand, we may not need the military to share its technology and tactics with police departments, as it seems the preference may be shifting toward having the military arrest and indefinitely detain (without trial) American citizens suspected of crimes.
I find it somewhat amusing how I grew up hearing about the evils of Castro and how he would ‘throw people in jail without trial for trying to exercise their rights to speech’. Now America executes its own citizens without trial, arrests them for exercising free speech, and we’re still losing the public health Olympics to Cuba.
If you’re asking yourself what predator drones have to do with structural violence, consider the $154 million pricetag on the drone (used to apprehend $6,000 worth of stray cattle), and ask yourself why our infant mortality stats look so bad. Priorities.
In other free speech news, professional journals are now being censored in the name of the global war on terror. To summarize those articles, basically a researcher has found a way the H5N1 (“bird flu”) virus could become highly transmissible (this is a virus that has a 50% mortality rate), and the US National Security Advisory Board on Biosecurity is looking to block (or at least redact portions of) the publication of the details of his experiments. This, however, is foolish, since anyone with sufficient funding and academic and laboratory sophistication could probably recreate his findings; the flu virus, after all, represents just 3 kilobytes worth of data.
Censorship is never the right answer. Nor is imprisoning persons without trial. I don’t understand how these concepts can fail to be self evident to those in power.