John Oliver reminds us why Joe Arpaio is so awful

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/11/john-oliver-reminds-us-why-joe.html

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Yeah, joe’s right up there with Senator Turtle MacTurtleface.

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Not to knock JO, but who needed a reminder?

That sad excuse for a man is pure-D awful…

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I remember when I first heard of him and Tent City in a glowing Reader’s Digest article twenty years ago. I still can’t find that specific article online, but it turns out it was by Len Sherman, who seems to have something to say about how badly he changed over the years.

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Shit like this is mainly why I must believe in karma. I’m also sadly fascinated that all the so-called Libertarians, who want the government to get the hell out of everything, think this is a good use of government power, while, you know, helping people is not.

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Good gracious was that some atrocious ear-rending singing. Not that i’m saying you’re wrong in the least, @frauenfelder, as the lowness of the bar that his abilities as a sherrif could stride confidently under is difficult to quantify.*


* I would like to apologize to my family, Strunk & White, and everybody here for that sentence.

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I’ve seen more than one piece of reporting in the “liberal” media (Slate, MSNBC, NPR, etc) that made it look like Arpaio’s greatest crime was forcing prisoners to sleep in tents and wear pink underwear.

He’s been whitewashed to an extreme degree, even when the reporting was supposedly critical. The mainstream media is rarely comfortable reporting on reality in America.

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Fair point; even though multiple prisoners died under his regime, I don’t underestimate the ability of the media to sugar coat whitewash any info.

*sighs

I’m so ready for this nightmare to be over…

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I don’t blame a crazy person for being crazy. Joe was first elected as sheriff in 1992, and was reelected five times. The fine citizens of Maricopa County wanted this walking lawsuit as Sheriff, and none of the things he did were hidden, he was fiercely proud of flouting the law and the courts.
Everyone who voted for him knew what he was and voted for him anyway.

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Many of the people of Maricopa County are not able to vote in any meaningful way. Sheriff Joe helped to make that so.

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Aye, and it’s an object lesson in the GOP’s own gerrymandering goals to keep Il Douche in office.

Arpaio might be a little shrewder, but he basically answers the question: what if Trump was a sheriff?

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Has any serious libertarian really said that? Not even Paul Ryan thinks the pardon was a good idea or that Arpaio didn’t break the law.

You’ll note, I wrote “so-called Libertarians,” and not “serious Libertarians.” I know the difference.

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“Unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares? Hopefully, they will disappear, that is, move from the ranks of the petted and cosseted bum class to the ranks of the productive members of society.” ~ Murray Rothbard.

Libertarians are just fancy dressed fascists.

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So you are basically saying trolls gonna troll. So insightful.

Yeah, that guy took an argument for freedom into a fascist extreme.

Current libertarians, at least of the Reason, Niskanen or similar variety, very much oppose illegitimate police action, much more so than progressives.

All that Chicago School support of Pinochet back in the 70’s was just, uh, playing devil’s advocate, yeah, that’s the ticket.

That’s why Gary Johnson is totally okay with private prisons, he’s all about that liberty and freedom.

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What about when the progressives are libertarians?

There may be some confirmation bias going on but my experience is that libertarian-capitalists are far more likely to unthinkingly support the cops than libertarian-socialists. This fits in with the theory that the police are there to protect private property rather than people.

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Right libs explicitly stole the nomenclature in the mid '60’s. In reality they have nothing to do with left libertarianism at all, it was adopted purely to muddy the waters.

Well yeah, that’s why

Is completely horse crap because they mangle “illegitimate” to mean whatever the heck they want.

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People had awful ideas in the 70’s. And Gandhi was a racist. What’s your point?

You are making a caricature of libertarians by choosing the worst among them and then debating their worst arguments.

This is better. Libertarians, at least in the US, do focus too much on property rights and neglect other basic freedoms. They read Atlas Shrugged and think themselves superheroes (don’t know why they like the book, most tedious thing I’ve ever read) and go very hard against the government helping the poor and sick, when a much bigger problem is the government oppressing them with.

But the US has been flirting with becoming a police state for a while (and Trump is making things much worse) and I always see libertarians fighting to end the endless wars in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq… to end legalized theft by the police, to hold them accountable for killing innocent people…