Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Aw, but that one dude seems maybe as though he is a Muslin terrist, and I'd think drowning a Muslin terrist for a Christmas miracle would rank high on the gift list of any right-thinking American. Dudes are not doing it right.

And now, once again cloaked in anti-cop righteousness, the SMBIVA's torrent of vitriol toward the working class emerges anew...

Got get 'em SMBIVA's. Mock those cops! Way to organize the Working Class!!!

"Pig." QED. The derision from the Lefty Listserv left never ceases.

I just don't know what the poor poor pigs would do if they didn't have wuff-tuff "working class" Miltie to suck stick up for 'em.

I was working in a print shop running cutters and folders some number of years ago and after I got off work I walked over to the 7-eleven to get some beer. As I walked into the parking lot a cop pulled up, hopped out of his car and came up and acosted me. Wanted to know who I was, where I lived, to see my ID, etc. I asked him what the problem was and he said that I looked like someone who got away from a jail work party and pointed to the blue shirt I was wearing.

The blue work shirt I was wearing was a US Navy uniform shirt. I showed him the little anchors on the buttons and informed him that the shirt was a US Navy shirt, not a jail shirt. He proceeded to tell me that I could have replaced all the buttons on the shirt. I scoffed at that and laughed which was a big mistake. Never laugh at a cop to his face.

Next thing I know I'm spread-eagle up against the car getting a full pat down search. I avoided arrest that day because I didn't have anything illegal on me and was not actually committing any crime. But the cop had a good time busting my chops, I could tell.

Oh, and there hadn't been any escape from any jail work party either, he just made that up. Cops are allowed to lie as much as they please.

The police are there to bust the chops of working class folks and make sure they stay in line. Lil' Milty's portrayal of the police as "working class" is a shitty joke and yet another example of how he's pretending to be "working class" himself.

Milton,

Cops aren't working class. You trade away any claim to membership when you choose to carry a gun in the service of property and law.

So, whatever...

>>>>The police are there to bust the chops of working class folks and make sure they stay in line

This sentence reveals that when it comes to the working class, you have no fucking idea what you're talking about.

BTW, you're right: "Never laugh at a cop to his face." They can smell class derision, and that's what your laughter was.

You think you're so much better than the Men in Blue? Fine, let's disband them. You and AlanSmitheee, and MJS, and Owen walk the beat. Fighting Crime With Snark and Archey! Let's see how that works out.

Jack,

Sometimes you make sense. Not here though. Your attitude is no way to organize the proles. Contempt is not a very good strategy.

>>>You trade away any claim to membership when you choose to carry a gun in the service of property and law.

Say who? You just made that shit up and made it sound like law. It's a non sequitur.

Oh, but little butthurt Miltie is working class! That's why he hangs out all day on SMBIVA baaaaawing about how all us mean ol' lefties are so mean and stuff to his super-pwogwessive demotard party.

Milton's being goofy. Meanwhile, I just want to mention that paying a $90 fine would not be "easy" for me or for most people I know.

How I love the name "Milton Marx" -- two of my favorite people in one moniker. I hope Milton chose it by way of compliment to me. I am a bit disappointed, though, that a whole hour and a half elapsed before he took his usual energetic but imprecise swing at this one, after I tee'd it up for him so nicely.

"BTW, you're right: "Never laugh at a cop to his face." They can smell class derision, and that's what your laughter was."

I was working for 6 bucks an hour in a print shop but my laugh at him was "class derision"?

You're delusional.

Dude was making several times the amount of money I was making. He should have been laughing at me in "class derision" you goof ball. Jeebus. Get a grip.

Why, didn't you know? Our little Miltie wrote the definitive fauxgressive manifesto - Areopwogitica.

You and AlanSmitheee, and MJS, and Owen walk the beat.

You laugh. But you have never seen Owen confront a doughnut.

>>>I was working for 6 bucks an hour in a print shop but my laugh at him was "class derision"?

Hipster slumming it at the print shop. Yes, class derision.

We have hipsters here now?! -- Besides me, of course. Man, have we arrived. I'm gonna climb right onto my fixie and go down to Avenue C and order me an ironic beer, by way of celebration.

Yeah! You're not a really manly man-man like little Miltie. You darn kids today with your lefty ideas and your ipods and your toaster struddel! Why can't you just vote democrat like the poor poor hard working man? Like little Miltie! {sob!}

Cop ain't a prole. Cop might be subservient to a hierarchy, in so much as he chooses to take orders, but he is obviously an enforcer. That's the gun on his hip what makes it plain.

Jack: I've known many a cop to cut many a working stiff a break, and look the other way. There's tremendous class solidarity, but often, given realities and obligations, expressed in subtle forms, even passive-aggressively.

Cops ain't stupid. They know they serve the privileged. They resent them too. Probably because they serve them. And when they can cut a break for a fellow prole, they'll do it. Seen this too many times for it not to count.

MJS: You might as well be a hipster. You do everything on this blog in air quotes. It's all irony and derision. And detachment. Enjoy that ironic brew. You've earned it.

Next time the cops don't set up the free speech zone corrals, spy on grannies collecting money for Cindy Sheehan, take notes for corporate, cooperate with the feds to elevate a pot charge for a poor black kid into a conspiracy racket - I'll be inclined to offer a hint of credulity when it comes to "class solidarity."

Jack: Blame The Man, not the guy collecting a check. Train your sights on bigger prey. You know the difference.

These guys aren't private school merit babies playing at being proles, like others around here.

Another one for the Pwog - English translator:

"Cops are my fwiends! You're all so phony! I'm the only real working manly man man here! Baaaaaaaaw!"

Wow! Little Miltie scored a 10.7 on the Butthurtometer. Way to go, Miltie!

Lil' Milty Marx... hanging at the Lefty Listserv admonishing folks to not hang at the Lefty Listserv.

As I've said before, hypocrisy is no crime but it sure stinks like one. Check your smell Lil' Milty, you're not passing the sniff test.

Where I come from, nobody knows what "pwog" means, or "progressive" for that matter. They know what Medicare means, and unemployment insurance, and taking the kinds of jobs where you go into rough neighborhoods and protect innocent families, or run into burning buildings and save thousands of people (remember that day --- the one you snarkers put a TM after now?), or even just a handful of people in a burning tenement. Or maybe they hold doors for people, or fix their leaking pipes, or drive them to the airport on a 7-day/16-hour schedule.

They work hard. They serve. They serve even the snarkerati who look down on them.

You elitist merit babies, in the name of some absraction, would strip them of what few hard-fought-for protections they have and leave them to the corporate wolves. You are totally out of touch with the pain working people feel. You have the same class attitude as an unregulated hedge-fund manager, but at least he doesn't pose as something else.

"You elitist merit babies"

Hehe...

you're a real hoot Milty.

Anyway, I'm not looking to strip the police of anything. I just pointed out the reality that to a lot of working class people the police are the pit bulls of the elitists who run the joint.

But since you're not working class you wouldn't know that. No amount of faking it or calling people silly names will change that.

"Where I come from, nobody knows what "baffled" means, or "angioplasty" for that matter. They know what "Go Packers!" means, and deal-a-meal, and taking the kinds of handjobs where you go on teh intarwebs and pretend to be a wuff-tuff intarbutt toughguy, or piss my pants and run around shrieking like a little girl (remember remember the 5th of November --- the one you meanies put a lulz on now?), or even just imma chargin' mah lazors! Or maybe they hold my tiny tiny penis for me, or fix my diaper for me, or drive me to the Chucky Cheese so I can be with the other retards on my play date schedule."

Fixed it for ya.

Tough crowd!

Now we need only Oxtrot to come back and tell us that if he were a Police Officer, there would be none of that backtalk on HIS beat. No iPods or disrespect! Miltie and Charlie could then trade stories about wrestling tournaments and gay bashing adventures and other TROO BLOO working class heroism.

Smithee, keep in mind when Lil' Milty said this:

"taking the kinds of jobs where you go into rough neighborhoods"

the rough neighborhoods he was talking about are working class neighborhoods... This is how I know he's a fake. Only people who don't live in working class neighborhoods would consider them "rough".

Milty's a phony.

Yeah, the "rough neighborhoods" thing was pretty funny. What an Aunt Polly phrase.

Well, sure, but he's also a galatic-sized lulzcow.

Nice try Drunk. I grew up in a rough neighborhood. We called it rough, and worse.

Nice try Drunk. I grew up in a rough neighborhood. We called it rough --- and much worse.

"I grew up in a rough neighborhood. We called it rough --- and much worse"

No you didn't.

Liar.

Brian,

I'm pretty sure Oxtrot has only ire for the police. I've never read him make an impassioned defense of police anything, nevermind "police solidarity with the working class."

Yeah, little Miltie grew up on the rough streets of West Hampton Dunes. He's down wit da hood, yo.

Smithee: how does "butthurt" differ from "hurt"? Why the "butt"? Is rape implied?

God, these ridiculous contests about class background. I am not going to go there.

I like Jack's take.

It's too bad that workers have a limited array of choices, but they don't have to be cops. Once they sign up, more often than not, they are the people's enemy. Class background does not exempt you from scorn when you are a quisling.

I had more than a few run-ins with cops in my youth (20 years back) usually as a victim of a crime but also because my best friend growing up was black and his mere presence aroused cop suspicion when we'd be hanging out. In each instance they were 100% not helpful in addition to being almost surreally stupid , racist and generally douchey. It's an authoritarian, violent job for authoritarian, violent people.

I have to qualify my last remark.

In the 90s, two NYPD cops rescued me and a new buddy from an imminent group assault on the Lower East Side. Credit where credit is due. Exception proving the rule in my case.

"Cops aren't working class. You trade away any claim to membership when you choose to carry a gun in the service of property and law.

So, whatever..."-JC

I beg to differ bro...

Yes Tarzie, despite JC's careless generalizations this issue is not as simple as black and white. That was big of you to acknowledge it.

Yeah, the "rough neighborhoods" thing was pretty funny. What an Aunt Polly phrase.

I'm getting a little confused by all the street cred dick-wagging goin' on here. So is the claim here that there is no such thing as a rough neighborhood? Or that the people who live in them don't call them rough neighborhoods? What do they call them?

I've got no particular use for Miltie, but I'm a little confused on what the objection is here.

Jack: I know. I was just riffing of one of M. Oxtrot's more authoritarian "my students would obey me" comments.

Coldtype,

You were a cop, yes? Institutional bias. Don't find many soldiers pretending their working class solidarity is always on display, either.

Because they take the dollar and do what they're told.

Just like cops.

But, you go ahead and single me out. Nice and easy. Don't take it up with anyone else who made similar claims. Just me.

Tarzie,

I've known good men who happen to have been cops too. And bad men in blue who did good things.

Doesn't mean they aren't enforcers for law and property.

When I was running companies, I wasn't a member of the working class, regardless of my origins.

Full stop.

I was the boss.

If I had a problem with a belligerent employee or a drunk or a break-in, I didn't sit down and negotiate a solution amongst staff. I called the cops. Who, almost invariably, sided with me. Because I was property, boss, company. Does a police think, "Well, I'm doing such and such because it's my job to enforce property and class relationships"? I doubt it. I've know hundreds of cops. None of them ever talked like that.

But most of them know their jobs - and keeping the peace looks a whole lot like enforcing the law as its written. And it suits the current set of property relations just fine, because it was written with those relations in mind.

Your average cop probably grew up in a working class environment. His class origins don't suggest anything but those origins. My class origins didn't mean that I was working class when I was firing an employee for her umpteenth late show. It meant only that I came from a place which I no longer occupied.

So too with cops, soldiers, floor managers and a good number of union reps.

Respect,

Jack

Jack,

I didn't regard that one experience as contradicting your overall point with which I still agree. I had simply realized that I had not been accurate about my overall experience.

I agree with everything you've said in your last post, putting aside the fact that class mobility seemed to make you douchier than the circumstances may have required, if your quick resort to police involvement and firing are any indication.

Heh. Swing and a miss, but funny.

Tarzie,

Guys calls it like he sees it, like it is, and you think that's "douchy." It's not. It's reporting reality. You're the douche in this encounter.

I don't necessarily agree with Jack on this point, but he's reporting how shit actually goes down. You're living in some fantasy bubble where people don't make real choices and deal with the world as it is. Yet another "radical" whose entire frame of reference if the Lefty Listserv.

No wonder the Left has made itself totally irrelevant. Could you and your comrades be more out of touch?

You're living in some fantasy bubble where people don't make real choices and deal with the world as it is.

Look Miltie, I will resist the temptation to demonstrate, via anecdotes from my own personal history, just how completely full of shit you are about the listserv dreamworld you are so sure I inhabit. Where I come from is irrelevant.

My swipe at Jack, which I think he correctly interpreted as tongue-in-cheek, was based on something every worker knows: that while a manager/owner usually has to be a douche in some way, some manager/owners, like cops, are, by choice or lack of imagination, douchier than others. If I erred, it was in suggesting Jack was the douchier kind without knowing all the facts, but then I was just kidding around anyway.

Look Miltie, I will resist the temptation to demonstrate, via anecdotes from my own personal history....

Continue to resist that temptation. For one thing, Milton's projectile confabulations are a thing of beauty in themselves, and facts would just get in the way. (As Oscar Wilde said: real ignorance is like a rare tropical flower -- only touch it, and the bloom is gone.)

But more importantly, Milton's idea here is to put those of us who contribute (rather than just heckle) on the defensive in a personal way -- turn this into a conversation about us and our backgrounds rather than a conversation about the institutions we confront.

It's an old familiar tactic, and you see it all over the place. Maybe the locus classicus is the way Zionists try to maneuver you into offering evidence that you're not an anti-Semite.

This all assumes, of course, that I'm not getting up in a somnioscriptory state in the middle of the night and writing Milton's comments myself, and forgetting all about it the next day. I mean, hey, cui bono?

Way to spoil the lulz, Father Smiff.

>>>rather than a conversation about the institutions we confront.

You flatter yourself. You're confronting nothing. And you know it. There isn't a single institution worthy of confrontation, or even not, that knows you exist. You are confronting the keys on your laptop, that's all.

And it took only three paragraphs for you to get to the Jews. I'd expect nothing less from a good-ole-boy.

"So is the claim here that there is no such thing as a rough neighborhood?"

Nope.

"Or that the people who live in them don't call them rough neighborhoods? What do they call them? "

Home?

"This all assumes, of course, that I'm not getting up in a somnioscriptory state in the middle of the night and writing Milton's comments myself, and forgetting all about it the next day. I mean, hey, cui bono? "

I knew it!

Well anyway, I'm done with Lil' Milty. It was fun for a bit but after a while it's just tiresome. Plus I think he has a parrot hooked up to a voice to text converter writing all his posts.

"merit babies!" Brawwwk Brawwwk... "merit babies!" Brawwwk...

I wish the cops would bust into his domicile and rescue the parrot then. What a horrible way to force any sentient creature to spend the holiday season!

Remember, Kids. Always use No Knock™ : Because Anything Else Is For Sissies.

You flatter yourself. You're confronting nothing.

Sensu etymologico. Maybe it would have been clearer if I had said "institutions that confront us".

And it took only three paragraphs for you to get to the Jews. I'd expect nothing less from a good-ole-boy.

Oh Milton, you poor devil, you really are a fish in a barrel. We need some rules of engagement here -- like groundhog season. Nobody, from now on, can respond to a Milton post, except on days of the month that are primes.

I have to wonder at the kind of mental gymnastics you need to see the the cops in Venezuela as totalitarian fascist stormtroopers at Chavez's personal beck and call, yet still maintain the closet fascist's admiration of American cops as working class heroes. I suspect you have as little familiarity with the one as you do the other, Milton.

"When I was running companies...".

"If I erred, it was in suggesting Jack was the douchier kind without knowing all the facts"

priceless

As I said, you confront nothing. And those who actually do confront Power and institutions, you mock, when you're not condescending to the working class. You call yourself a lefty? Please.

Oh, and "somnioscriptory state," "sensu etymologico"...as my old man said, "You can't make this stuff up." At least Bill Buckley, that old racist and defender of Power, didn't hide his elitism behind pseudo-leftwing blather.

It's the 23d of the month, by the way. OK to respond.

Your old man? You're a lousy actor, Miltie. Your "old man" always said you were stolen adopted from the home for orphaned alcohol syndrome kids. Your "old man" traded your whiny little ass for a nickles worth of meth, Miltie. The Demoshit party has been your surrogate 'old man' ever since because they abuse you just like dear old dad.

So clever and creative AlanSmithee. I imagine tens of people read your blog.

The next time the 8th graders in your "rough neighborhood" beat you up, lets hope they steal your SAG card too, Miltie.

And those who actually do confront Power and institutions, you mock, when you're not condescending to the working class.

And who would those people be? Democrats? Because the Democratic Party certainly isn't an institutional manifestation of power. Nope. No way. Not a bit.