Jubbergun wrote:
Whether or not this was a Wal*Mart had no bearing on my interpretation. If the store were a Target or a K-Mart, my observation that there is a code of conduct regarding how people are supposed to behave in public that no one adheres to or chooses to enforce would have remained the same.
This is not realistic.
Jubbergun wrote:
Anyone with the ability to Google, which is pretty much everyone here, could tell you that the only thing "broad discretionary powers" in the hands of rent-a-cops guarantees for management is a hefty price tag when settlements in civil trials are agreed upon or verdicts are handed down. Given that you've already mentioned "legal tangles," I can't imagine that a manager wouldn't want to intervene when a customer is confronted by another customer and a member of their security staff when one of the pair is hurling racial epithets at the customer.
The customer didn't use racist epithets until AFTER Dot raised his voice and used profanity. The rent-a-cop did not use force.
There's no basis for a lawsuit. The rent-a-cop handled the situation 100% correctly, by the book.
Jubbergun wrote:
I'm terribly amused that someone, like yourself, who is constantly in a snit over the behavior of police is so cavalier about the behavior of their lesser, wanna-be brethren. I'm not, however, surprised, since your only interest is in spitting bile at your betters whenever the opportunity should arise, but it just shows how your opinions aren't based in any sort of principle, but are instead flexible depending on who you wish to injure and/or champion in a given situation. Your silly diatribes about how you'll one day have your vengeance upon the cops who arrested you for acting like a belligerent jackenape make for some delicious irony when placed next to your excuses for the security guard here in this thread.
My opinion of rent-a-cops is even lower than that of cops. I implied so much in my response.
In another thread, I sided with the cops. You have no basis to argue I'm biased beyond reason since I'm willing to side with those I do not like when the facts warrant it.
Jubbergun wrote:
The underlying implication of your responses is "fuck Dotzilla, he was in the military, and deserves to be spit on, because I said so."
I did not say that his ejection from the store was immediately justified by him being military, I said it was because he showed poor judgement.
Jubbergun wrote:
Military service, of course, being yet another one of those forms of people actually doing something other than spouting nonsense on the internet that shows that the participant(s) is actually making a change in the world, for good or ill, that just pisses all over your delusion that your very existence and "intelligent" insights cast into the electronic nether somehow make the world a better place.
Denying the difference between good and evil is the definition of amorality.
Believing you're important because you smash something is the definition of barbarism.
Jubbergun wrote:
We live in a world that is governed by the use of force. The military is a necessary evil in such a world. The authoritarianism is necessary, not only because you can't have everyone with a gun, tank, or plane running about willy-nilly doing whatever they please, but because that authoritarianism imposes a necessary degree of civility on duties that are generally not civilized. It is the choke-collar on the dogs or wars. The violence is organized, in part, to reduce casualties and "collateral damage." It is organized because it's not meant to be the unrestrained violence of savages. There is honor in it, whether you ascribe to the ideals of honor in combat handed down from antiquity or not.
This is self-serving tripe. We got by for over 150 years with almost no military and many countries have gotten by without for far longer.
Show me the man who admits he is an agent of evil. For all the dubious causes people have shed blood throughout history, everyone's always got a lame rationalization. Those rationalizations always somehow come back to the "honor" and "heroism" of the military lifestyle. They call it the "Old Lie" for a reason.
Jubbergun wrote:
Not surprisingly, combat/war brings out the worst in people,
like the shooter that went on a rampage in Afghanistan, but no one holds men that behave like monsters up as heroes.
However, there are those men that we hold up as an example of what not just soldiers, but human beings, should aspire to be. You find nothing "morally correct" about the military and its members, but how often have we put that military and the men who constitute it into combat to protect oppressed populaces, stop the spread of tyranny, or just to provide aid?
The answer is never. Not since World War II which was fought by civilians. We started using mercenaries when it became clear the citizens weren't willing to fight evil wars.
Hamas, the Nazis, the Communists, feminists, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, the Greeks and Romans - as far back as you like to go, you can find ideologically motivated groups that did evil things but also did some good along the way. The good they do does not justify or make apology for the evil. At best it's no different than any other form of cynical PR.
We don't say that Hamas blowing up schoolbuses was justified because they provide medical care and schooling for Palestinians. We don't say the Holocaust was justified because of hypothermia research or reforestation programs. We don't say the gulags were justified because of education or ending serfdom. We don't say that feminism is justified because it protects battered women. We don't say that the Crusades were justified because they founded hospitals. We don't say the horrendous, despicable cruelty perpetrated by the Ottomans, Greeks or Romans was justified because they built roads and taught people to read and write.
In each and every one of those cases, the good and evil were completely discrete. Using one to justify the other is pure laziness.
By the same token, we don't say that the invasion of Iraq or the My Lai Massacre were justified because some Vietnamese people ultimately got jobs and money or because some Iraqi village got some new gear even as most of the people wish that the invaders would just get the hell out of their country.
I'm sure if we lost WWII, and the Nazis and Japanese conquered America, they'd have done some good here, too. Wherever they went, they plastered up posters telling everyone how much they wanted to help the native people out. If America had been invaded, I doubt you'd find their posters extolling the virtues of the Occupation very convincing, though. I don't think you'd see the foreign troops patrolling down YOUR home city as "good guys doing their job".
I'm sure if bin Laden had his way and America became an Islamic Republic, a thousand years down the line we'd probably be a much more harmonious society. That is one of the greatest goods that Islamic jihad has done over the ages - it has brought at least a degree of peace and order, however wanting, to many societies. That good that jihad has done does not justify the evils committed now or in the past. And most of those evils were unnecessary anyway.
But I don't expect you to accept 9-11 as some "necessary evil" perpetrated because someone intended to do good at some point in the future. Or because this same guy fought for his people's freedom against a Commie invasion. bin Laden and what he does is evil.
So I fail to see why you think our military should be judged by a different set of standards than is applied to anyone else on the face of this planet.
Jubbergun wrote:
The military is a lamentable necessity. While you always employ 'cognitive dissonance' as some sort of insult (while never showing enough introspection to see how often you're guilty of it yourself), it's a necessity for those who served and had to perform the most onerous and personally damaging of tasks. That 'cognitive dissonance' you dismiss is proof of the morality of those service members. If they were amoral, as you suggest, there would be no remorse. There would be no human and/or moral component involved with what they did, it would simply be rationalized away with no emotional impact as their having killed an enemy.
Cognitive dissonance is by definition the product of rationalization. And many people attracted to such a lifestyle are quite free from guilt.
Jubbergun wrote:
If you and others don't feel as if you should have to "tread on eggshells," so be it. It's a free country. It makes perfect sense that you would feel/think that way, since that attitude reflects the same lack of concern for others, that same deficit of common courtesy, the same "fuck you I'm more important," that Dotzilla described in that wretched woman in a Wal*Mart. The only difference between you and she is education, volume, and grammar.
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No one is more actively opposed to this being a free country than the military. Who else commits mass murder then tries to cover it up to justify their existence, extorts 10% of every dollar we earn to keep its constituents on the dole, spies on, abducts and murders random citizens, even murdered a President in cold blood?
He could have just gone around her. There's nothing courteous or genteel about yelling and using profanity, and it wasn't effective in making her or society at large more civil. No good came of it.
When two uncivil people meet and have a disagreement, they will settle it in an eminently uncivil way. When a civil person has a disagreement with an uncivil person, he will do what he must, but he will not stoop to her level just cuz he feels like it.
If the stakes are not worthwhile, then the civil person will have the good sense to walk away - or around. That is why civil people are civil.
If yelling and swearing gets something done, I'm all for it. The fact is, it didn't.
