Ep16 : Chris Dorner, The Myth of Redemptive Violence
b"The first in a two part series examining various aspects of the Chris Dorner affair. After an brief recap of the relevant events, Kevin expresses his disbelief at the militarized and trigger happy LAPD manhunt following the Dorner slayings. \\n\\nJad and Kevin discuss the positive social media response to Dorner's attacks on the police and the continuum between lone gunmen and revolutionary armies. The episode wraps up with an analysis of the historical tendency to embrace violence as a means to fight oppression and the myth of redemptive violence--the narrative that captures humankind's relationship with violent power.\\n\\n\\nMaterial from Podcast\\nMusic\\n\\nDown Rodeo by Rage Against the Machine\\n\\n\\n\\n\\nReferences\\n\\nChristopher Dorner on Wikipedia\\nSWAT on Wikipedia\\nWalter Wink\\nThe Myth of Redemptive Violence (Babylonian and Greek Creation myth bit)\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\nTranscript of Podcast\\n\\nJad: Hello and welcome to another installment of the JK Podcast. This week is the first in a two-part discussion around the curious case of Chris Dorner, the details of his crimes, and those of the Los Angeles police department are by this point, well documented by dozens of mainstream and alternative online news sources. Here's a rough sketch of the story to provide posterity with enough detail to follow along with our discussion. \\n\\nChris Dorner was an L.A.P.D. police officer and naval reservist who served with the mobile in-shore[?] undersea warfare unit, including a brief deployment to Bahrain ending on April, 2007. In July of 2007, he reported a superior officer for excessive force during an arrest. The review board - two L.A.P.D. captains and a criminal defense attorney - unanimously ruled against Dorner. They concluded that he was trying to avoid a bad evaluation from the superior officer. As a result, Dorner's employment was terminated on September 4th, 2008. \\n\\nFor the next 3 years, he appealed several times upward through the California legal system and was ruled against each time. In early February, 2013, Chris Dorner wrote a rambling Facebook post alleging pervasive and systemic bigotry and corruption from the top to the bottom of the L.A.P.D., and declaring a number of members of the L.A.P.D. and their families as targets in what was planned as a long series of vengeance killings in an effort - somehow - to clear his name. He then killed the daughter and soon to be son-in-law of the L.A.P.D. captain that served as his counsel during one of his appeals. \\n\\nA week later, he killed an L.A.P.D. officer and wounded 3 others in several ambushes. Now it was time for the L.A.P.D. to go on a shooting spree. During the manhunt for Dorner, they fired over 100 rounds into two separate vehicles, completely unrelated to Chris Dorner. Luckily, they were unable to kill any of the passengers. A few days later, Dorner was supposedly caught in a cabin at a ski resort outside L.A. Kevin covers this part in more detail in part 2, but spoiler alert, they burn down the cabin - allegedly on accident - and though the body was charred beyond recognition, Dorner's driver's license miraculously survived - case closed.\\n\\nAfter touching on the obvious and oft discussed problem with having standing armies serve as peace officers, we talk about the narrative surrounding the events. Many denizens of social media supported Chris Dorner based on the overwhelming awfulness and injustice of law enforcement in general, and the L.A.P.D. in particular. This despite the fact that two-thirds of his kills were completely innocent, by any standards of justice outside those of organized crime who see family as legitimate targets, and U.S. foreign policy, who see family, friends, people standing nearby, coralligenous[?] and anyone else in the same or surrounding countries as legitimate targets. Let's join the conversation with Kevin's enthusiastic response to my query about possibilities for this week's topic."