The Keep Us Safe Society

It's worth mentioning that this locked-down surveillance state in the Twin Cities is a function of basing the last couple of Presidential elections on which candidate can keep the American people safe. By focusing on that to the abstraction of all else, we start to value security over liberty, and we stop questioning the encroachment of those liberties. This is really unacceptable:

The only interesting events going on here are the raids of local hippies by an aggressive and corrupt county sheriff, and I'll be heading to the formal protest in a few minutes. What's dispiriting is just how complicit people are in this security state; outside the Democratic rapid response center, I spoke to a (probably liberal) woman who expressed comfort at all the security in that it will help prevent bombs from the anarchists.

This is the essence of 'security theater', intended to intimidate rather than protect. I took pictures of the riot police, and I have to say I was scared in doing so because there was literally no one around, two squads of riot police, and brick buildings on one side and barbed wire fences on the other.

This isn't a Republican problem, by the way. The Fleet Center in Boston in 2004 was just as bad, and there's ridiculous amounts of security theater all over the country, supplemented by higher security budgets since 9/11 and a blanket acceptance of our loss of freedoms by citizens and elites. Go to Capitol Hill or the White House and you'll see what I mean, though the conventions are far worse.

And it's even worse - rubber bullets are being fired at protesters, tear gas, water cannons and pepper spray is being used. It goes without saying that there's no opportunity for this to shock anyone's conscience because it simply isn't being played on TV. But even if it was, I'm not so sure that there would be a majority opposed to the actions. The fetish of "being kept safe" - the idea that abusing your fellow man is OK in the name of security, even without evidence that there's a security threat and when the goal is not security but intimidation - has really lowered our threshold of intolerance toward this.