So, Dirty Harry was a whining- bashing liberals movie, is all??

Most right wing movies, like DIrty Harry, are a total bore on their own terms, without the "subtext" of hatred of liberals, they are as boring as those extreme left wing propaganda pieces extoling the virtues of whatever...both are TOTALLY UNREAL, totally self serving, preachy and utterly irresponsible.

Either that, or it was just plain old totally fascist; I used to think that fascists only hated communists, but I was wrong. THey hate everyone to the left of them, and DIrty Harry was just a call for what they clearly meant to do, which was destroy America and everything it ever stood for, or tried to stand for.

Now we have the higest rate of incarceration per capita of any nation on earth, dwarfing China is both absolute numbers of prisoners, and its obscene per capita given their much greater population.

You scum have a lot of damn nerve bashing China.

I don't see much connection between Dirty Harry and incarceration rates. I mean sure, the people who want to lock everyone up and throw away the key probably like Dirty Harry movies, but it's not like they wouldn't be that way anyway.

I think Dirty Harry was about a cultural and intellectual disconnect between the people who make decisions for our society and the people who have to live with those decisions "on the street". It's less liberal-bashing than REMF-bashing. I think Harris missed a lot of the point - for example, in the third movie, "Big Ed Mustapha" wasn't just a stereotypical black radical, he was another pawn set up to take a fall and expected to play his part in a game that was rigged against him. Harry plainly realized that he had more in common with Big Ed and more sympathy for him than his superiors in the department.

Harry wasn't out to save the world, he was just a guy trying to do his job, which happened to bring him in contact with a lot of extremely violent and often depraved people, and sick of all the bullshit and hypocrisy.

Our incarceration rates are largely the product of the War on Drugs. And while it doesn't excuse ours, you should realize that China's rate and the absolute number of prisoners there are both much higher than they admit to, and higher than the US.

TheyCallMeBruce:

I don't see much connection between Dirty Harry and incarceration rates. I mean sure, the people who want to lock everyone up and throw away the key probably like Dirty Harry movies, but it's not like they wouldn't be that way anyway.

I think the push to "lock 'em up and throw away the key" is the natural result of telling people that having the police arrest and imprison criminals must be their only source of protection. People who feel confident of their ability to kill muggers while staying within the law, for example, are probably not going to demand that convicted muggers spend their whole lives in prison quite as emphatically as those who would be at any non-imprisoned mugger's mercy.