d. watkins (also known as dwight) had a rough go of it on cnn just now. he was arguing with one of thousands of police spokesmen drenching the airwaves. now, one thing he did with that spokesman was say something like "of course you'd defend members of your gang'. the first time i heard this move was after rodney king in '92; i had a student from south central la, and he said - i gather making a commonplace observation in his world - that there were three major gangs in los angeles: the crips, bloods, and the lapd. he characterized the lapd as the most violent and irrational of the three.
now, if you are an anarchist (which i admit will discredit you in some circles, particularly in morbidly authoritarian or capitulation culture, e.g. the political right and the political left), this is just flatly, literally true. i personally define anarchism as the position that government has no moral legitimacy, no moral justification to exist. (i take myself literally to have proven that. no one cares, but they have no argument, no plausible reasons to give, on the other side. the point is just to capitulate, not to give reasons or whatever.) now, if that's the case, armed groups roving your neighborhood, whether they have badges or not, are all of a piece, or can only be assessed morally, first, in that they are strutting around town with weapons, which may be a bit of a problem in itself. but they can be assessed in part by their actual effects: if the crips are more violent, or more arbitrary, or more racist, etc., then they are worse than the police, and vice versa. but they are doing exactly the same thing.
but, rule of law! don't get me started, peon. tell me the crips don't have a list of rules, a code, and punish you for violations. but...the social contract! heavens this is the most ridiculous and the most actually discredited argument in the history of human thought. just start with hume's "of the original contract". but it does not matter, it really does not matter to anyone, whether it's a completely ridiculous argument. but what about the collective? it's not just the individual. well, the collective on this account broke freddie gray's neck. either that was someone in particular, or it was all of us together. was that you? because that's what you just asserted. you should be punished for it, or all of us together should be, i guess. start beating yourself and anyone you see on the street. that's all of us together, putting baltimore under military occupation. it's the protesters, confronting themselves with automatic weapons and armor. correct, little b? these are really sad and stupid arguments, a leering semblance of rationality. but any reason is a good enough reason to submit.
i do want to point out that human beings have also been known to resist, though. they are doing that now.
