Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> >
>
> And whatever the details are, pepper spraying someone who is
> handcuffed and locked inside a car has nothing to do with
> goose/gander. The police aren't judge and jury.
I think we ought to extend to Wojtek the same understanding that we have argued in this thread should be extended to everyone -- his choice is imposed on him by external circumstances. His history, the complex of social relations in which he is and has been enmeshed, is such as to impose on him an unreasoning and irresistable terror of physical harm from individual aggression, and his experience and knowledge provides no alternative response but an equally unreasonable and idrresistable trust in state authority, no matter how irrational and/or brutal that state authority may be. (This is a pompous way of putting what B. Russell said in explantion of Hobbes's politcs: He was a physical coward.)
Carrol