Excellent post and the stuff most Americans ever get to read. Pity! My one objection is to your terming Vladimir Putin a thug. Why is he a thug? Because he is too powerful? Was a member of the Secret Service? So was Bush Senior, so is Clapper and lots of others. Because he may have ordered people killed? US presidents do that all the time: ask anyone from a Third World country. Bush Junior killed over half a million people with his unprovoked attack on Iraq. Or is the term thug simply a way to blackball a foreign leader, to avoid dealing with him rationally, to deprecate actions that he sees to be in his country's vital interests whether we agree with them or not. It seems to be just another display, probably unconscious, of that American disease, so threatening to many and deadly to others: American Exceptionalism.
why did the officer demand that she put out her cigarette? It was not a threat to him nor prevented or made it more difficult for him to give her a ticket. Why order her out of her car if she is willing to answer his legitimate questions? Dag Inge is correct. If she was white, she would still be alive
Excellent post and the stuff most Americans ever get to read. Pity! My one objection is to your terming Vladimir Putin a thug. Why is he a thug? Because he is too powerful? Was a member of the Secret Service? So was Bush Senior, so is Clapper and lots of others. Because he may have ordered people killed? US presidents do that all the time: ask anyone from a Third World country. Bush Junior killed over half a million people with his unprovoked attack on Iraq. Or is the term thug simply a way to blackball a foreign leader, to avoid dealing with him rationally, to deprecate actions that he sees to be in his country's vital interests whether we agree with them or not. It seems to be just another display, probably unconscious, of that American disease, so threatening to many and deadly to others: American Exceptionalism.
why did the officer demand that she put out her cigarette? It was not a threat to him nor prevented or made it more difficult for him to give her a ticket. Why order her out of her car if she is willing to answer his legitimate questions? Dag Inge is correct. If she was white, she would still be alive