Five on-duty law enforcement officers have killed in Alabama by gunfire this year, which carries a death penalty.
Such a penalty not only has proven to be no deterrent, in the latest killing the suspect was in no danger. He assassinated an extremely popular Sheriff and later just walked into custody with the gun in his hand.
Sheriffs essentially are a political position. In this tragic case the Sheriff’s political position was especially notable for three reasons.
One: An unpopular white man assumed historically unexpected control of Alabama after alleged electronic vote machine fraud
In 2002, Republican Bob Riley narrowly beat Democrat Don Siegelman in the Alabama gubernatorial race when several thousand votes from Baldwin County, Alabama, [87.3% white] mysteriously switched from Siegelman to Riley when Democrat observers left the polling place after midnight. “When Baldwin County reported two sets of results, it was clear to me that someone had manipulated the results,” said Auburn University political scientist James H. Gundlach in a report on the controversy, A Statistical Analysis of Possible Electronic Ballot Box Stuffing.”There is simply no way that electronic vote counting can produce two sets of results without someone using computer programs in ways that were not intended.” According to Gundlach, such electronic ballot-stuffing could be accomplished by having access to the “tabulating computer at some time before the election to install [a special electronic] card and after the election to remove the card.”
Lowndes County is predominantly black. It had a population of around 11,000 in the 2010 census. In 2007, more than 60 people gathered at the Lowndes County Courthouse to protest then-Gov. Bob Riley’s appointment of a white law enforcement officer to replace the county’s deceased sheriff. At the time, the county commission president said all five commissioners and other elected officials had recommended Williams, who is black, for the position.
Three: Instead of the plant of an unpopular white Sheriff by the unpopular white Governor, it was Williams — an exceptionally popular black veteran of military and law enforcement — who eventually was elected to the job. Willams just was assassinated by the young white son of a neighboring county’s Deputy Sheriff. As Williams was meeting a group of people at a store about a loud music complaint it was the Deputy Sheriff’s son who walked up unprovoked and fatally shot Williams reportedly in front of his own son.
..the sheriff was speaking with someone at the scene before William Chase Johnson got out of his truck and approached him. “William Chase Johnson exited his truck with his pistol in hand. William Chase Johnson approached “Big John” Williams without provocation and shot Sheriff “Big John” Williams while he was fulfilling his duties as Sheriff of Lowndes County, Alabama,” the suit states.
It is not clear yet whether and how race was a factor. However, it is clear that electronic voting fraud is real and this killing has the hallmarks of a political assassination, which already has seriously shaken the community. The suspect fled and then a few hours later returned to the scene on foot carrying the assassination weapon as he calmly turned himself in for arrest.
Expressing concern over the “highly unusual circumstance” of [Judge] Mershon “confronting her directly and privately,” Eckerle sided with the prosecution, which contended that Mershon “altered” the victim’s memory, “and by using judicial coercion and intimidation, that he overcame her, causing her to claim falsely that she had lied (at) trial.”
When that didn’t work, because courts rejected false claims and suspected coercion, the judge somehow convinced the unpopular governor with only a few days left in office to pardon sex crimes. The judge continued to play a partial role by personally celebrating with the accused.
Mershon picked up Hurt at the state prison in La Grange on Friday and drove him to his mother’s house, the retired judge told The Courier Journal on Monday.
A child abuse expert weighed in the same story and correctly concluded this all an obvious abuse of the justice system.
Pamela Darnall, president of Family & Children’s Place, a regional child advocacy center that evaluates and treats children for sexual abuse, said she was shocked by the circumstances of the pardon. In general, children do not lie about sexual abuse, she said. “The research continually bears out that the majority of kids are not making it up,” she said. Darnall said she was disturbed that Mershon later sought out the victim, which the prosecution argued caused her to change her story. “These are people in power. This is a judge,” Darnall said. “This is what kids deal with when people who are the adults … pressure these kids.” Nor could Darnall understand Bevin’s willingness to pardon Hurt. “A leader steps in and says I simply believe it wasn’t true so I’m going to pardon him,” she said. “What kind of message does that kind of behavior send to our kids and send to adults who have lived with their secrets for so many years?”
In related news at the end of the story, the governor says murder with a vehicle is not murder.
Jerry Thompson was killed in 2014 when his vehicle was struck by a car driven by Wibbels. The governor wrote that Wibbles “was involved in a tragic accident and has been incarcerated as a result of his conviction for wanton murder. This was not a murder.”
Wibbels was driving in traffic such that he allegedly used an emergency shoulder to illegally pass when he struck Thompson’s vehicle head-on.
Italian dictator Mussolini was hanged (with his mistress) before he could be tried for war crimes. His soldiers claimed themselves victims while “committing atrocities that for 60 years have gone unpunished.”
The short answer: these pardons serve to undermine democratic institutions and demonstrate “strong man” capabilities of an unaccountable leader.
This kind of manipulation process should be familiar to some as canon of social engineering, with many books already written on the subject.
It also is well documented through the tragic history of the developing world, cruelly manipulated during the Cold War to foment coups and drive power towards dictators who would serve some narrowly-defined agenda (instead of allowing representative democracy). Chad, Guatemala, Angola, Mozambique, Iran…the list I’ve written about on this site alone is long.
The White House unilateral and un-American move to pardon war criminals shows how power is being manipulated by foreign military intelligence campaigns leveraging bias, much in the same way developing nations were manipulated during the past 70 years.
Rolling Stone explains succinctly how a modern system of malicious social media is being used:
Russia’s goals are to further widen existing divisions in the American public and decrease our faith and trust in institutions that help maintain a strong democracy. If we focus only on the past or future, we will not be prepared for the present. It’s not about election 2016 or 2020.
This is spot on. Militarized information campaigns push bias every day to build power slowly in order to wield at a moment’s notice, which Rolling Stone refers to as emotional drive:
She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.
Pardoning war criminals thus does three things for the current White House by generating disgust:
Demonstrates bias towards “supreme leader” who can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, regardless of law. This generates disgust among those who believe in the rule of law, such as the Constitution. Also this negates any commentary about war-crimes being committed in Syria after American forces retreated. It’s a negation of both domestic and international moral code.
Demonstrates bias towards the “Christian warrior” who can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, regardless of law. This generates disgust among those who believe in the rule of law, such as the military code. Soldiers pay attention to example and failing to hold bad examples accountable generates dissent in ranks.
By establishing these two bright lines of disgust on social media and elsewhere it slowly helps identify the extremists in America happy to obey a dictator. We see two national tests of loyalty based on emotive-based bias. Those disgusted by such obvious violations of laws are classified as disloyal to dictatorship and abruptly pushed out in favor of servile minds that give an ok to overtly destroying democratic concepts like the Constitution.
To make a finer point on this, some American military leaders are convinced that mutually assured destruction (MAD) kept the world free of war, while others realized there have been many wars despite MAD with untold suffering and the UN primarily has served to prevent escalations. This used to be a minor point of division worth debating.
By fueling bias, military agents have turned that division into a massive fissure where people are disgusted by the opposing side; either rule of law is respected (e.g. a UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is signed easily) or laws get ignored because might is said to make right (e.g. abuse of children gets called an inherent right of parenting).
Already we see people defending the White House by saying their dictator can do no wrong as they consider the current occupant “strong” and therefore above all laws. They’ll follow his orders to abuse anyone even the most vulnerable populations unable to defend selves.
To be fair the supporters of the current White House don’t necessarily like its occupant as much as the theory of “strong man” power that political scientists used to refer to as fascism. The support is driven by disgust with representative democracy, which means there is desire for dictatorship where a small cabal of power can even dispose of the current bumbling occupant and his family.
There even could be simmering intent to soon install a new and more competent/healthy dictator via secret police (typical role for those who commit war crimes) in order to better achieve some narrowly-defined self-serving agenda (e.g. national socialism, where a very small group gets defined as being an elite nation to absorb all benefits away from much larger state populations).
Here’s how Mussolini himself described it in a text he was credited with in 1932 (“La dottrina del fascismo”, an essay written by Giovanni Gentile):
Fascism attacks socialism first, then tries to destroy all of democracy. In a reverse theory, Mussolini here is giving away the gatekeeper/antidote. He apparently believed if people helped genuine socialist candidates and causes they were holding back the slide to dictatorship.
At that time the bias technique was against “bolshevism” and for “pacifism”. Hearst (and the Koch family) were far less successful than today’s Zuckerberg, however, and the pro-fascism leader in America failed to get elected President that year.
Here you can see why the 1932 Presidential election was so critical to the rejection of fascism; rejection of the “strong man” propaganda spreading at that time
An Allied victory in 1945 clearly cuts fascism lines short. WWII soldiers from America destroyed the Axis forces, which had defeated socialism and trained their guns on all of democracy. This victory restored faith in laws and institutions (e.g. establishment of the UN) and meant the US was able to even export concepts of teamwork and respectful collaboration (lean out) onto occupied fascist countries. In that sense, Germany and Japan have become something of time-capsules for the values of the US that made it so successful.
Here’s how seasoned leaders have described the current White House attacking military values and authority, which appears to most as a mad man throwing away America’s democratic legacy to replace it with the disgusting ideas of fascism:
To put the US back on track and reverse the White House, these pardons for war crimes need to not disgust and divide the nation. And that seems unlikely given how fascist tactics are intended to disgust anyone who really believes in rule of law, let alone gave an oath to uphold the Constitution. A bully push towards divisiveness and away from law, as a disgusting test of loyalty, is exactly why the White House pardoned the accused.
See also: “2016 Republican Candidate: Fascist Week 2016”
As a little child I once got a ride to school from a neighbor who had a Subaru 4×4 that could go where school buses were failing (another time our bus was rescued from a ditch by a Korean-war 6×6 but that’s a story for another day).
Her tiny white car slowly crawled in low range over big prairie snow drifts and up the icy dirt hills. She softly patted the dash with her heavily bundled hand and yelled “COME ON BESSIE” above the roar of a little EA82 boxer engine that could.
It has been so many years, I wonder did she put her Bessie down and was it cruel when she did it? That’s the kind of question being asked by MIT in a new article asking if pressing an “off” button is equivalent to a machine murder. Maybe that’s the wrong question entirely, since they can be turned on again? Are you god if you can switch a robot on?
Here’s a particularly funny part where a “roboticist” notices that humans in high-risk/controlled environments like to name things and minimize changes.
Julie Carpenter, a roboticist in San Francisco has written about bomb disposal soldiers who form strong attachments to their robots, naming them and even sleeping curled up next to them in their Humvees. “I know soldiers have written to military robot manufacturers requesting they fix and return the same robot because it’s part of their team,” she says.
Should we accept this as some kind of exception as opposed to a norm? Who doesn’t name things or keep them close, even ones we don’t mind turning off?
The General Grant. Naming our automation machines is a long tradition.
Here’s a thought. Sleeping with a machine preserves integrity and reduces cost of trust. Returning the same one helps maintain integrity too, as every machine tends to have particulars.
I’d challenge this roboticist to put such behavior in historic context of soldiers and their machines for the past 100 years. And despite my “Bessie” experience, I’d say we trend more towards machines as extensions of our bodies, and not really companion-like.
In fact the old Japanese theory suggests we are less likely to anthropomorphize robots that appear the most human-like. We might be most comfortable turning them off due to what they called the “uncanny valley“.
Attachment seems to come more from extension of our functional needs, which makes sense especially for bomb disposal risks, and helps explain the reasoning behind shooting victorious horses after battle has ended.
Of all the times I held my named laptop (because of course it has a name) in my arms, even sleeping next to it, nobody ever wrote about this as some kind of attachment. And I’d say they probably didn’t need to.
In fact I’d guess the percentage of security pros who keep their systems close and avoid rotations is near 100% but why call that a study subject?
