Members banned from this thread: Ethereal and RichardMZhlubb |
Cotton1 (06-08-2021),Red Lily (02-28-2021),Sybil Ludington (02-28-2021)
Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
~Alain de Benoist
Back to the topic of the thread, though, it has always seemed to me that some folks reserve their outrage and resentment toward "State power" for the federal government. Any civil authority, down to your town council or mayor's office, can represent "the State". Just as the federal government does frequently practice overreach and seek to extend its power over citizens in ways the Founders didn't intend - and you'll get no argument from me on that score - state and local governments are also sometimes guilty of infringing on those rights and freedoms recognized by the Constitution. When this happens I sometimes hear the idea of "state's rights" or of "local control" invoked, as though their status as lesser jurisdictions somehow absolved their legislatures, executives and bureaucrats from having to respect their citizens' rights as Americans. Infringement is infringement.
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard
"Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas and not eat a chicken fried steak." - Larry McMurtry
donttread (02-28-2021)
Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
~Alain de Benoist
In my lifetime I have noted, if anything, a tendency toward there being an increase in skepticism, regards State power. Think about how the police were viewed in the t.v. shows of the '50s and '60s - 'Dragnet', 'The Untouchables', 'Adam-12', etc. - as well as the F.B.I. and U.S. intelligence agencies. They were always the good guys, with nary a whiff of corruption and no bad motives, who wouldn't dream of violating anyone's rights. If you bad-mouthed the police or accused them of wrongdoing, you were obviously guilty of something. If you had a problem with them conducting a warrantless search or wiretapping your phone, you must be hiding something.
We as a society have become far less amenable to simply taking orders, keeping our mouths shut and seeing government as our friend. Without doubt the most marked conversion is among social conservatives, who used to ardently defend law enforcement and federal intelligence gathering agencies as maintainers and preservers of the status quo, and to dismiss any talk of "civil rights" - or of privacy violations - as "radicalism" or worse.
Ethereal's OP, like so many of the forum's current threads, equates compliance with government directives aimed at reducing the spread of a virus that has killed more than a half a million Americans in the last year with "less skepticism toward state power", and I just can't take that leap. Are people more willing to follow a directive like mask-wearing or social distancing than they would have been thirty, fifty, seventy years ago? Hard to say. I do recall, however, the "duck and cover" drills in the public schools during the Cold War era. And I'm not old enough to remember when 120,000 U.S. residents, more than 74,000 of them citizens, were sent to internment camps because of their racial ancestry - with very little in the way of public criticism arising - but I've read about it.
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard
"Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas and not eat a chicken fried steak." - Larry McMurtry
You're just a pathological liar.
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Last edited by Admiral Ackbar; 02-28-2021 at 09:24 AM.
Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak. And that it is doing God service when it is violating all His laws.
--John Adams
MisterVeritis (06-06-2021)
Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak. And that it is doing God service when it is violating all His laws.
--John Adams
FindersKeepers (02-28-2021),MisterVeritis (06-06-2021),Sybil Ludington (02-28-2021)