Mike Brock and I disagree on some things. However, I’ve always known him to be scrupulously attentive to his choice of words, wanting to get his statements precisely right — sometimes to the point where you want to poke him.
So I’m giving his latest post at the Western Standard due consideration:
Then they said they wanted to search my bag, because I was “wearing a black shirt”. To which I replied, that I did not consent to any searches. I told them that I would not resist them, and that any search they conducted was under protest. They simply said, “we don’t care. We want to make sure you don’t have any bombs to kill us with.”
They demanded I present identification, once again I complied under protest. To which they told me they didn’t care again.
Then one of the officers told me that, and I quote, that I (me) “don’t care about the security of the city.” To which I protested. They then called me “ignorant”.
I asked them why they were using such vulgar language with me, and they simply denied that any such language had been used. Despite having literally sworn at me multiple times, seconds prior.
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I asked Arnie not to wear a black shirt on Sunday, because I suspected it would draw negative attention. (As it turned out, the green shirt didn’t help…)
And I personally wouldn’t have been “sitting down on University Avenue” yesterday, and I’m not 100% sure what that means. On a bench or what? Part of it is called “Hospital Row,” and it also houses the legislative building at the far end, and the U.S. Consulate at around its half-way point. So yes, University Avenue is what you’d call a “target rich environment.” But there are a lot of other businesses and a few restaurants and stores there, too.
Mike lives and works downtown and I don’t, so he’s got more “reason” to be down there than, say, I do.
You can discuss the event here.
Interesting comment from elsewhere:
Sounds like the cops are breaking taboos flustered by the experience of a mob breaking all the taboos on which we and the cops ordinarily depend, the taboos rooted in the history where our ancestors agreed to all step back from the knife edge risk of some unstoppable violence of all against all. It seems the cops are trying to scare us back into recognizing the most basic taboos.
But in not actually targetting a black hat who has lost the taboo – i.e. someone who doesn’t deserve the rights he would deny to others whose property he destroys – and in seeking a scapegoat from among the innocent, the cops are only further eroding the trust on which the shared taboo depends.
It all goes to show that in our PC paradise, there is very little residual trust, and that once the established order gets knocked down there is not a lot of shared common sense about how to renew it through makeshift channels.
The cops were performing a parody of speaking man to man with Brock about what reality looks like when all the usual masks come off. They were discovering that they don’t really know how to do that, and that once the usual cop-citizen norms break down, we no longer have the residual shared cultural assumptions to make things work man to man.
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