is pleasure something you "take"?

2015.


South Carolina.  Walter Scott.


Baltimore.  Freddie Gray.


---------------- Reader Comment (The Guardian)


...For this type of injury to occur, there needs to be compression from both the front and back of the neck.  Most likely, one or more officers had their boot on the back of his neck while he was laying face down....




--------------- Reader Comment


The term you're looking for is "curb stomped."




-------------- Reader Comment


That there is a word for that type of abuse is heartbreaking




------------- Reader Comment


There is a culture of impunity, no doubt.  But my point is that this is more than 'roughing' someone up.  It is a kind of violent sadism that exists across the various departments.  People who beat on someone to the point of death don't do so out of temporary necessity, they take a pleasure from the power relations.




------------ CBS News HEADLINE


Baltimore PD chief:  Cops in Gray arrest "not out of control"





----------------------------


---- Reader Comment


remember that eric garner died for selling loose cigarettes


____________________________


1968.


"It would be wrong, it would be self-deceptive...to conclude from this act that our country itself is sick, that it has lost its balance, that it has lost its sense of direction, even its common decency."
-- Lyndon Johnson


---------------------- [Sabato excerpt] ------------------- When the Democratic National Convention met in Chicago in late August to nominate Vice President Hubert Humphrey,





fury about Vietnam turned downtown Chicago into a domestic war zone,





as youthful demonstrators clashed with Mayor Daley's police.  Inside the hall, where tear gas occasionally could be smelled and reporters were fair game for pummeling by Daley's angry allies, there was little peace.








But calm prevailed for the showing of yet another film about yet another lost Kennedy....


Politics continued for the living, and the last Kennedy brother was the focus of intrigue. 


Mayor Daley tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Ted Kennedy to permit a draft from the floor so that he could carry the party's banner instead of  Humphrey.  By contrast, no one tried to draft Lyndon Johnson for another term.


Johnson had hoped to give a valedictory speech as the retiring chief executive.  The conclave had been timed originally to coincide with his birthday.





But he chose to stay away... . ------------------- [end excerpt, The Kennedy Half Century, by Larry J. Sabato.  Bloomsbury-2013] -----------------














Haynes Johnson, a reporter who covered the convention for the Washington Post, has recently written:  "The 1968 Chicago convention became a lacerating event, a distillation of


a year of heartbreak,


assassinations, riots


and a breakdown in law and order that made it seem as if the country were coming apart.


In its psychic impact, and its long-term political consequences, it eclipsed any other such convention in American history, destroying faith in politicians, in the political system, in the country and in its institutions.


No one who was there, or who watched it on television, could escape the memory of what took place before their eyes."





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