i am so confused by this thread.
because i have to start somewhere, i guess, if i am interesting in untangling things enough to begin sorting out what, if anything, there is of interest in it...let me get something straight.
dk: when you wrote this:
Quote:
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As I said before, we've given up on judges. They are useless as servants of the people. The only thing most of them do now is perform as tools of the bloated government machine.
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in response to analog, i wonder if you know what you are in fact arguing...and as this seems to me the logical center of your arguments, really (not as they follow from the anecdote you spun the thread out of, but of the position from which you interpret it).
in bureaucratic states, the police are usually defined around possessing a "monopoly on legitimate violence"....the functionality of this "legitimate violence" is hooked to at least two wider systems: the notion of legitimacy is political and so to the state as a whole; and within a system of jurisprudence, to the system of law and its instruments (legal and institutional)--which can be boiled down to the theater of interaction between state power and the citizenry, the courts.
if you are going to argue that judges are political appointees, then the response is more or less "duh"....
if you are going to move from that to a claim that therefore judges are incompetent, or are so politically motivated that it comes to the same thing, then what you are saying is that for you the court system is illegitimate.
why is that?
from what i have read from you, i can put together some premises for the claim.
as a militia guy, you would prefer to see the present social and economic system replaced with a variant of the lockean state of nature, which i assume you would conflate with a notion of jeffersonian democracy in order not to make the starting point seem ridiculous out of the gate.
i would assume, then, that you oppose capitalism in all its forms.
but i have never seen a coherent argument about this from you.
i often think that you imagine that capitalism is somehow detachable from its institutional infrastructure, as if the social world was made up of color forms on a board and so you can just take own the ones that you dont like and leave the others in place. this is typical of conservative libertarian types, and is of a piece with the delusions about free markets that you often hear or read from these positions.
you seem to think of the state solely as a repressive bureaucracy and not as also being a set of public institutions that citizens can bring pressure to bear on in order to effect change in direction--or could, during periods when popular mobilization is possible--now, in a period where politics is conflated with blogging or yelling at your tv set while you sit in your living room, the state operates relatively free from pesky sustained public pressure.
if there is a real, underlying problem with states at this point, much of it follows from the fact--and this is a fact, like it or not--that globalizing capitalism is developing along a logic that requires the functions that had been attributed to the state to be shifted to a transnational level, with the effect that the state is loosing its power to make meaningful policy and along with that is becoming a secondary institution---the effect of this is that power functions (you know, power: like the making of economic and social policies, shaping the rules of the game) without any meaningful accountability in that there is no institution that citizens can mobilize around and pressure to change the rules of the game--so the problem is that globalizing capitalism is wholly anti-democratic. and it also follows that whatever the problems onbe might have with the capitalist nation-state (and there are many one could have) it was MORE democratic than the existing order is shaping up to be. and the problems with the capitalist state apparatus follow NOT from internal procedures, and NOT from the question of whether one has to pressure the state from within or from without the electoral charade--rather they follow from the class structure that the state sits upon and from the unevenness of access that class system generates and reproduces. in marx-speak, the problem lay with the entire mode of production--the state is but an expression of it. and the central problem that people are stumbling around inside of now is that this old arrangement--which was based on the central position of the nation-state--is being defunctionalized.
well, this is the dominant tendency at any rate--in some regions of the world, it is more developed--in the united states, it is a bit less fully developed (or is less obvious at this point as a function of geography more than anything else)
it seems to me that you have nothing to say about this sort of development, and so find yourself in a position that cannot help but be incoherent from a viewpoint that is not saturated with the same premises that yours is.
what you seem to propose, really, is running away.
running away into a version of the 18th century, running away into some combination of fantasy and vicarious nostalgia.
you want to strip away the color forms associated with the state and those associated with asepcts of capitalism you do not find to be aesthetically appealing and leave behind the color forms associated with a kind of bourgeois libertarian politics that you jam into a framework derived form jefferson and locke.
if you look closer at the kind of arguments you make, it is self-evident that for you the central issue that condenses all others is your right to have as many guns as you want.
the "real" problem for you lay with the institutions that you see threatening your right to have as many guns of as many types as you want or could possibly want at any future point for any reason. the real problem then is law. but you cant really oppose law as such, because even in the lockean fantasyworld you seem to prefer, there are laws. if someone steals your shit, you can kill em. boom, fucker, and with that i'll take back my lawnmower. so you can't oppose law as such. so you revert to some constitutional fundamentalism that lets you set yourself up as some martyr (a real american screwed over like all such real americans by the simple fact that history has happened since 1787) and to make clear that what you really want is an eternal 1787. except different because there are other things that you'd probably like to keep from that evil bad history that has unfolded since 1787, like indoor plumbing, electricity and a telecommunications infrastructure etc..
so based on this constitutional fundamentalism, you oppose the courts that implement the law. because you see them as endangering your god given right to have as many guns of as many types as you want or could possbly want.
i sometimes wonder if the logic behind this, which links the stuff above to your particular opposition to courts and judges and the existing legal system as a whole has something to do with the old school black helicopter thing. you remember, i am sure:
the united nations is sending black helicopters all over the united states. these helicopters are the leading edge of a takeover by the united nations, which will soften us up by changing laws and taking away our guns and thereby reduce us all to slavery. this because guns are particularly powerful magic: they are the condition of possibility for self-consciousness, which is the condition of possibility for freedom in any meaningful sense. so it is that without our guns, we are condemned to pure immediacy and therefore to enslavement.
there seems to be a foggy recognition of a certain limited dimension of the actually existing situation in this, but in the main, that argument--anything like that argument---is simply fucked up.
but through it, you can come to see the judges in particular as a Persecuting Other, courts as Theaters of Persecution and the State as a wholly repressive apparatus. you dont need to be coherent about what is going on because all this follows from the threat of castration, that is the threat of having your magic wand taken from you, your guns confiscated by the Forces of Transnational Evil, the new and improved update of the world jewish conspiracy.
this would mean that because you see judges as foreign agents in a sense, you have to see courts as something entirely other than the theater of interaction between the state and the citizenry. that would mean that the police become arbitrary----police actions are supposed to be limited to enforcement and not adjudication--being arrested is not being convicted etc---so the police would be rendered necessarily arbitrary and/or irrational.
from here, you interpret the factoids adduced in the op.
but you dont need the factoids in the op because you have decided all this beforehand. you decided all this deductively and present your conclusion wrapped up wth very strange, highly chopped up information about the baltimore pd as if you were engaged in an inductive process, as if you were building your position up from information. but you aren't.
there are a host of reasons to oppose most if not all of contemporary capitalism. there are a host of reasons to operate in a politically radical space. but there are requirements if you are going to do that, and one of the most basic requirements is that your analysis of the existing order be coherent.
yours isnt.
i find the idea of extreme right paramilitary organizations dreaming of an armed coup d'etat kind of unsettling, and the fact of the matter is that an armed movement coming from that position is about the only condition i can possibly imagine that would make me into a defender of the existing order.