dcnovice
Posts: 37282
Joined: 8/2/2006 Status: offline
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quote:
He obviously liked that metaphor for his philosophy, and used it repeatedly. Well, he said in the video that he'd used the analogy "once" in a meeting, and he used it again at whatever gathering was filmed. Persnickety editor that I am, I'm not sure I'd count twice as "repeatedly." That said, he does seem to like the analogy. I think it's important, therefore, to look at the context in which he used it. He started out talking about the limited resources of his enforcement team and the resulting need to be strategic. Then came the Romans, the shock-and-awe experts of the ancient world, whose tactics he'd identified as being "kind of like" his approach to undertaking enforcement with limited resources. I'll come back to them in a minute. Armendariz then quickly said that he was talking about "people who are in this case not compliant with the law." He thus bracketed the Romans fore and aft with his primary concern, his duty to oversee the enforcement of environmental laws. So now back to the Romans. What was Armendariz drawing from them? Given that he set the analogy within the context of law enforcement, I honestly don't think he was advising random persecution of innocent people as a terror tactic. What I think was he was trying to say--and, dear God, I wish he'd found another way to say it--is that law enforcers with limited resources (akin, if you want to go with the analogy, to the Romans' being vastly outnumbered by the folks they were conquering) sometimes use the power of example, by prosecuting malefactors, as a tool to encourage compliance with the law. As I said earlier in the thread, I wish that were not necessary, but men are not angels. quote:
Do you notice what some have tried to do on this thread? They wish to equate any questioning of how power mad little fucks go about doing their jobs, with an attack on the existence of the entire agency. I did, but I didn't pay it much mind. Folks may have been confused by the thread title (which might seem to target the entire agency) or the language in the OP (which appeared to pin one man's ill-conceived comments on the entire "Obama administration"). I also think P&R posters tend to paint with fairly broad brushes (he says broadly), so I'm not surprised to see it here. Edited because I seem to be particularly typo-prone tonight.
< Message edited by dcnovice -- 4/29/2012 5:35:44 PM >
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No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up. JANE WAGNER, THE SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE
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