Brain Rot: To Serve And Protect

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http://profiles.google.com/silberdrachi Erik Gilson

I’m sorry, I’m all for satirization of current events but implying that police officers are blowing the heads off protesters and laughing about it is a bit too far…
- Charlie B
  
  Ever since guns were invented, police have been blowing the heads of protesters and laughing about it. Before guns they used swords and clubs.
  
  But I understand what you are saying. “It can’t happen here” is a very popular point of view! We’re still in the rubber bullet stage in the USA.
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G63FEamhpA0
  - http://profiles.google.com/silberdrachi Erik Gilson
    
    Not saying that it cant happen, I’m saying that it isn’t happening right now and that implying something like that detracts from whatever point the author was trying to convey.
    
    Its somewhat like people who use swear words in their arguments feeling that they provide greater emphasis on the topic. Yes it grabs people attention, but when you go overboard and start using them all the time your argument loses some of the emphasis because the audience thinks you are just a ranting loon.
    
    The same point could have been made with cops doing what they are actually doing: Beatings with clubs, tear gas, and beanbag guns. But the author made a choice to use the image of a man getting the back of his head blown off and I feel the argument loses validity at that point. It loses the basis in reality and makes it look like author is lying to create controversy (and they are). If they are lying about getting people’s heads blown off maybe they are exaggerating the point of the comic as a whole?
    
    Good political comics might push the limits of truth, but they don’t outright lie to the reader, or else they lose their credibility and look like a bad joke.
    - eyebeam
      
      No, that kind of thing has never happened in America
      
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
      - http://profiles.google.com/silberdrachi Erik Gilson
        
        Really? Where did i say it hasn’t happened? I said it wasn’t happening NOW.
        
        I’m sure the next person is going to reply saying i forgot about the race riots too.
      - robdobbs
        
        Do you mean the “right now” when you wrote that or “right now” right now? Because Kent State was “right now” back then. (esp. for those who died.)
      - TheMudshark
        
        Really? Where did i say it hasn’t happened? I said it wasn’t happening NOW.
        
        So by NOW, you mean it has not happened in the past three weeks, with this particular movement? Because cops brutalizing, shooting and murdering people without necessity sure as hell has happened this year.
      - robdobbs
        
        Bah! I didn’t read to the very next post. Silly me – I should be shot… with a rubber bullet.
    - Charlie B
      
      If you want accuracy, Youtube has several videos of policemen murdering defenseless, unarmed men in the United States.
      
      Personally, I don’t mind that Boss Tweed wasn’t really quite as fat as Thomas Nast portrayed him to be. I suspect political cartoons such as this are intended to present something more meaningful than photographic realism.
      - dnietz
        
        Exactly right Charlie. Cops kill innocent people all the time – several people a year.
        
        These people that are “offended” by this comic, are either cops, work for cops, or have cops in the family.
        
        Those of us that don’t have a personal investment in cops know the realities without the distortion of bias. Cops are bad. There is no such thing as a cop that is not corrupt.
      - Guest
        
        There are too!! They ride unicorns.
      - Charlie B
        
        I’ve personally known several cops that were not corrupt, dnietz.
        
        However, I have never known a cop who was unwilling to use force on other people. It’s a job requirement; they carry guns and clubs.
        
        If we do not hold police accountable for the innocent people they kill – if we do not treat them at least as harshly as we would treat a murderer who was not a policeman – we will foster and encourage police brutality, and may actually create sadists. It’s a great disservice to the police themselves, as well as to society in general. In Oakland, the police have been allowed to torture and murder unarmed captives – so, obviously the Oakland PD is going to attract sadists.
        
        Rudolph Diels, the founder of the Geheime Staatspolizei, commented rather cogently on this very subject in 1934.
        
        “The infliction of physical punishment is not every man’s job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task … I tumbled to the fact that my organization had been attracting all the sadists in Germany and Austria without my knowledge for some time past. It had also been attracting unconscious sadists, i.e. men who did not know themselves that they had sadist leanings … And finally it had been actually creating sadists. For it seems that corporeal chastisement ultimately arouses sadistic leanings in apparently normal men and women, Freud might explain it.”
      - Artor
        
        I’m willing to bet money that your friend, the not-corrupt cop, knows guys in his department who beat suspects, take bribes or “favors,” fake evidence, etc., and he’s held his tongue. If your job is to stop that shit, and you don’t stop your buddies when they do that shit, then you are tarred with the same brush.
      - FrodeSvendsen
        
        He states the exact same thing further down in his post..
      - donovan acree
        
        Hey Charlie B,
        You say you’ve known several cops that were not corrupt. Really? Did they ever arrest a fellow officer for violating the rights of a citizen? Does anyone have an example of a police officer arresting another police officer in order to stop them from violating the rights of a citizen?
      - origilla
        
        “I’ve personally known several cops that were not corrupt, dnietz”
        
        Citations please!
    - Guest
      
      Your it and his it are different its. It is happening, right now, insofar as a identifiable trend has been identified.
      
      Also, it’s al lot easier to show one protestor getting shot in the head clean through than it is to show the scores which have been merely aimed and fired at.
    - robdobbs
      
      I sez purdon?
      
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
- dnietz
  
  No it’s not, because they have already shot protesters and if you know any cops personally you would know that most of them fantasize about doing just that.
  - robdobbs
    
    Most of them? Be careful with your over-generalisations. There are plenty of fine police out there.
- Artor
  
  Police have blown innocent people’s heads off before, many times. They have been known to laugh about their brutal actions. They have been gratuitously brutal during the recent demonstrations. Now, can you explain why it’s “a bit too far,” to combine these elements in a cartoon? It’s only luck they didn’t kill Scott Olsen with their “non-lethal” weapons.
joeposts

I’m sorry, but I insist all my cartoons accurately reflect reality. I also get upset whenever Garfield eats lasagna, because lasagna has cheese and cats are usually lactose-intolerant. Unless I missed the strip where Jon cleaned up Garfields diarrhea with a sponge, in which case I owe Mr. Davis an apology.
- Lobster
  
  If someone’s trying to make a point about the real world I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them for some sort of accuracy.
  - joeposts
    
    Ask all you want.
- daneyul
  
  I don’t insist my cartoons reflect reality. I would like them however to be a bit more than an illustrated sociopathic fantasy.
  
  But maybe that’s just me, if you like it, fine. Hopefully you’ll get that cat-diarrhea-comic itch scratched too one day.
daneyul

Great. On a day when I’m pissed at the cops, a comic that’s so over the top it makes me want to defend them.

I mean, if it led somewhere–a punch line, a poignant observation. Anything.

But this was just simple-minded, hate-propagating crap.
- dnietz
  
  Nothing wrong with hating cops. They spend their entire days and years hating civilians. What do they expect in return for all their behavior?
  
  I have known many cops personally in my lifetime and I have never met an honest cop – not one. There are a few that you would think are honest, but that is only because you don’t know them well enough.
  
  There is no such thing as a good cop. They are all bad, all of them. Not one of them serves society. They all serve themselves and/or their masters.
http://homebiss.blogspot.com/ Saidul A Shaari

What the heck is this? A sarcastic look at People Power or law enforcement agencies?
robdobbs

Brilliant. Really cuts to the chase of the situation.
Andy

It’s an interesting concept, I believe it’s called Hyperbole. check it out – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  I believe it’s called Hyperbole.
  
  Some people don’t understand figurative language. When you use a figure of speech, they perceive it as a lie. This is complicated by the fact that they don’t believe that figurative speech even exists, since they can’t perceive it.
sagodjur

Hyperbole has NEVER been an effective tool for making a point – not even in a million years!
- daneyul
  
  I saw what you did there.
- Lobster
  
  Just because some hyperboles work doesn’t mean they all do.
http://www.bensnider.com/ Ben Snider

I don’t think anyone has yet thought deeply enough to get this comic lol. It’s only two levels.
- Guest
  
  you mean that it’s all but a quote?
  
  http://articles.cnn.com/2011-09-26/us/us_new-york-air-security_1_commissioner-raymond-kelly-terrorist-plots-security-measures?_s=PM:US
davel_jonez

I think the hate is being propagated by the police attacking peaceful protestors with “less than lethal” weapons. Weapons which are, in fact, lethal.
Guest

He went out tiger hunting with his elephant and gun.
In case of accidents he always took his mom.
He’s the all American bullet-headed Saxon mother’s son.
ROSSINDETROIT

Le me break it down for you. Skip this if you understood the comic. Upper echelon cop describes high tech means for detecting and foiling hypothetical threats. He’s unaware of the beat cops behind his back kicking citizen ass. Contrast: The PR of advanced and professional preparedness versus the reality of old fashioned street level brutality.
This explanation has been brought to you by The DUH Society.
- daneyul
  
  Let me break it down for you.
  
  It’s not that the comic is hard to understand–indeed, it’s the sheer heavy-handedness that makes it so annoying.
  
  Duh.
Finnagain

Professor Kennilworth Dissects the Joke. Seriously, stop taking yourselves so seriously. Seriously.
http://echofox3.blogspot.com efergus3

Welcome to Oakland, CA…
donovan acree

Over the top huh? Here is a video of police shooting a protestor in the head and then laughing about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G63FEamhpA0
donovan acree

After my previous post, I realized that some might argue that was a rubber bullet and the comic showed a protester getting shot in the head with a bullet. I can see the argument that there may not be a moral equivalence here. So, let’s see if protestors are killed in the U.S. by the authorities… Oh yeah, Kent State. Four dead and nine wounded. Jeffrey Glenn Miller, age 20 shot in the head for protesting. Clearly we have a history in the country of shooting protestors dead.
Nicholas Tuzzio

Between the posts BB has had lately about police brutality, and the text of the comic being fairly realistic (NYPD /can/ take down a plane), I don’t even find this to be hyperbole. You guys have some thin skin when it comes to cops, I guess.
Nadreck

This is indeed a grotesque exaggeration. All the cops are doing is firing technically non-lethal rounds at veterans*, cracking (not puncturing!) their skulls and then laughing about it *later* (not right on the spot!) when they thumb their noses at the courts and the law (which they are above anyway) during the whitewash “investigations”. This is the kind of irresponsible hyperbole that leads people to mutter darkly about “genocide” in situations where all that’s going on is “ethnic cleansing”. They’re as different as margarine and butter. It’s not as if one could ever lead to the other so there’s no point in indulging in all this artsy-fartsy “foreshadowing” and “extrapolation” stuff. We all know that when people turn truly evil it’s because they are hit by Evil Rays from Outer Space which instantaneously turn them from normal people to Evil people**: there are no intermediate stages of unchecked, escalating, less-than-pure-evil behaviour.

* or just sneaking into their houses and blowing their heads off http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/tag/jose-guerena/
** which was proven in many Silver Age comics such as Jimmy Olsen #83
http://hbeeinc.com/blog Paul Day

@joeposts:disqus wins! The comic makes a valid point. You don’t need riot gear to break up something that’s not a riot.
Charlie B

Orgilla, donovan acree:

Tiny towns in West Virginia rarely have large municipal police forces, and in such places, corrupt policemen are not at all commonplace. Think outside your gigantic concrete boxes, city folk!

In any small agricultural or mining community, a policeman could easily be related by blood to half the population of a town. Only through strict impartiality and fairness can such a person do his or her job well. And in such places, if you don’t do your job well everyone will know it, so you won’t get to keep the job.

Sadly, there are still corrupt cops even in small towns. I have encountered a few – they tend to prey on outsiders. But they are not the norm like they are in places with large populations.

This is one of many reasons I can’t stand to live in a city, and cultivate a lifestyle that does not require city infrastructure.

Brain Rot: To Serve And Protect

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