In this case, I think the original "when you are a hammer" feels more right. Imagine what kind of person you must be to pretend to be someone's friend, make him commit crime and them murder him in cold blood, while thinking you did the right thing.
Even then, hammers have uses. People like this don't.
The victim here was not "murdered in cold blood", and the policeperson who shot him by accident was not the same one who'd goaded him into committing the crime.
Sorry if this is off topic, but: I think that taking reasonable steps for both protecting our rights as citizens and not screwing up the environment are sort-of the same topic: making sure that future generations have life as good as our generation (or my generation, I am in my early 60s) have it.
Native American Indians have a philosophy that our actions should be guided by what is best for future generations. Being apathetic and sleep-walking into a less free future society, and screwing up the environment are selfish acts.
This comment sums up what Hacker News has become perfectly.
Front and center is the sentence correcting some slight, inconsequential anachronism that has nothing to do with the overall point of the comment and only serves to show the perceived intelligence of helpfulness of the commenter. Then there is a short sentence, more of an afterthought, addressing the point of the comment.
Well, have you met these people? It's common in work/life too. "You're smart and do good work, but stop being so pedantic and socially inept!"
You can't break out deep thinking from the surface layer aspie absent-social-mindedness. Just smile, accept them for what they are without pitying them, and keep making the world a better place together.
"American Indian" is an official term, and moreover it is a term DESIRED by some aboriginal rights activists in the United States, like the founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM).
Again and again we see questionable or outright illegal police shootings of dogs and people and nothing ever comes of it. The responsible parties are never charged with manslaughter or even fired. I want to support the police, but the thin blue line bullshit has to stop!
I get that police work is often dangerous but individuals that have shown poor judgement are retained on the force. That police officer that shot the dog 4 times had already shot and killed a developmentally disabled guy who was brandishing a knife but could have been tazed or bean-bagged.
These are not the sorts of people to be handing out guns to.
I think the thing that frustrates me the most is that in situations like the one you describe where developmentally disabled guy is killed and there were 100 ways to avoid it. Those ways simply are ignored after the fact because people feel such a need to defend the cop that they can't even acknowledge that they might have done something wrong. It creates a situation where improvement is pretty much impossible, because to improve one generally has to admit that there is a problem.
No American police are generally resistant to training of any type, such as firearm training. They don't like other people telling them they don't know how to do their jobs, that would make them lose confidence. It's why they need to shoot at you sixty times in order to hit you once.
A refusal to take advice is asking for trouble and paints a bad picture of any profession. Always take the advice, you don't have to use is, but you do have to take it in. How do people get like that?
They aren't exactly rocket scientists to begin with. Hell, the police in America have won the right to discriminate against candidates with high IQs...
Are there any reliable statistics quantifying this? I found some numbers for Germany on Wikipedia [1] but not for the US. The article states that per year for the period of 2007 to 2011 the German police fired between 36 and 57 bullets at humans killing between 6 and 12 of them. Older numbers are less reliable but similar regarding the number of people killed (peak since 1970 24 in 1983) but with a larger number of bullets fired where reported. Are the numbers for the USA way worse after compensating for the difference in population?
I'm astonished by the total lack of conversation around the actual data here. Both the article itself and the discussion below are predicated on the assumption that this is a rampant problem in the USA, but not a single subthread on the actual incidence of this.
I'd expect better from Hacker News.
For what it's worth, Wikipedia has a complete list of people killed by US Police Officers and the police reports from them. In 2012, there were 587 people killed by police [1]. This is much, much larger than in Germany, even accounting for population difference.
I would argue that more relevant than pure population is differences in homicide rate. By the data you've given, approximately 1-2% of all homicides in Germany are by police officers (6-12 officer killings, 690 homicides in germany [2]). It's worth noting that in the USA, approximately 3% of all killings were by police officers (547/14748[2]) which seems in line with what my understanding would be -- it's worse in the USA but not ridiculously disproportionate.
We (US residents) haven't posted annotated lists because this is in our face via newspapers and TV news and viral videos passed around on the Internet.
When TV news and viral videos and newspapers make us feel like terrorism or kidnapping is more prevalent than it actually is, we call it sensationalism. Why is this any different? Is it because it confirms things you already believe to be true?
I looked at the list you provided, and tried to correlate it against the Wikipedia list. Many of the dates etc don't match up but I tried. A number of the cases where the suspect is listed as "unarmed" don't jive with the police reports, at the very least. Others involve things that are clearly assault even if there was no gun (like assaulting someone with a car).
That said, I do think in particular if you are a black male you are likely to be mistreated by police. That's not justifiable. But I still don't see real evidence that this is an epidemic or particularly pervasive.
A lot of the abuses don't have good statistics around them.
I personally know a guy who was put into a private jail on trumped up charges and denied bail. He fought in court, won, and has been presented with a large bill from the private jail. The kicker? The DA, the sheriff and many in the police force are investors in the private jail!
That sounds terrible, I'm sorry for your friend. Systemically that's broken and represents the potential for massive abuse.
That said, I assume you'd agree that anecdotes don't constitute data, and that we shouldn't develop strong beliefs on the backs of them. To assume the prevalence of something on the basis of loud anecdotes leads us to being easily manipulated -- in the absence of data I believe should keep our priors weak and seek better data.
Actually I believe that our brains are wired to work from anecdote to theory, not from statistics to theory.
In a small group this is a pretty good strategy. Where it breaks down in life is that the odds that we hear about an anecdote depend on the anecdote. This leads to all kinds of bias.
I know the limits of my conscious analysis. I therefore have come to accept that there is value for me in filtering out "something that happened to someone I directly know" from "something I heard about". Since this happened to someone I directly know, it affects what I think.
YMMV, and if you follow my rule, definitely should. But you'll at least understand why I might come to different conclusions than you do.
Epistemology is not my strong suit so please excuse me here, but how can you reasonably advocate for your positions in a worldview that specifically privileges personal experience?
I tend to agree that we infer theory from anecdotes not data and even that that is a good thing. But don't we have a responsibility after developing a theory to evaluate it before making claims about it?
Epistemology is not my strong suit so please excuse me here, but how can you reasonably advocate for your positions in a worldview that specifically privileges personal experience?
Epistemology is about how we know what we think we know. This is very separate from rhetoric, the art of trying to convince others with your words.
I personally focus on epistemology, which includes clarifying what I believe, why I believe it, how strongly I believe it, and what different things I could reasonably believe in different circumstances. Knowing these things often leads me to conclude, "I believe X, you seem to believe Y, there is no way that I am going to change your beliefs." This seems to me to be a feature, not a flaw.
I am unable to be friends with strongly religious types who are unable to muster the same feature.
I tend to agree that we infer theory from anecdotes not data and even that that is a good thing. But don't we have a responsibility after developing a theory to evaluate it before making claims about it?
In my world view, yes.
If you see me failing to properly qualify what I claim, then please call me on it.
That said, when I make a claim, I'm almost never going to give my full supportive reasoning for my world view. Life is too short.
Data is only as good as the interpretation of it. You've just handwaved away a police homicide rate of an order of magnitude because the general homicide rate is also much worse. Other western democracies are bunched around a homicide rate of around 1.0/100k (Germany is 0.8), and the US is a clear outlier at 4.8. Having double the proportion of this significantly higher homicide rate is not something to claim as 'proportionate' and hence not a particular concern for the issue at hand.
One wonders at what point you would consider it 'ridiculously disproportionate'? 10%? 20%?
That police officer that shot the dog 4 times had already shot and killed a developmentally disabled guy who was brandishing a knife but could have been tazed or bean-bagged.
It gets worse. The person being arrested already had a lawsuit filed for police brutality. According to his lawyer on NBP, he recognized the police officer who killed his dog - that was one of the officers who had been part of giving him the beating that his lawsuit was about.
Police shoot dogs because black and brown people own dogs.[0]
The developmentally disabled guy was black.
Of the people raided by SWAT teams in the article, the ones who did not go to court (regardless of whether or not they won excessive force settlements) and had a violent or lethal encounter were all black or in that one case, hispanic.
Police officers aren't punished because the victims of police brutality are overwhelmingly nonwhite. It's not that the victims are poor, or of mysterious sexual orientation. It's really because they are black and hispanic.
To get a good grip on how segregated U.S. cities are, here is the Census rankings of "dissimilarity," or measure of how unmixed the population is geographically[2], of every metro area.[1] The lowest of all metro areas is 32%, which suggests that about 1/3 of black people would have to move to white parts of town to achieve balance.
Routine brutality against blacks, as opposed to routine brutality against protesters (an equally heinous but different problem), is ignored because the victims don't live next to us.
It's easier to mistreat minorities, but the behavior is no longer bounded to being perpetrated against minorities.
Police, searching (in the wrong town) for a man wanted for an expired vehicle registration, shoot family dog while searching in a gated back yard for their suspect.
We have to ask ourselves: where is the money? Our rights aren't being lost to a sprawling military-police state just because there's a Big-Brother wannabe conspiring to destroy the constitution. Police departments grow the same way our project departments grow in engineering companies: by managers arguing for bigger budgets and spending more, sometimes wastefully, to justify bigger budgets come next fiscal year.
These hyped-up (sometimes roided-up) SWAT teams do what they do to justify their existence....no manager wants to preside over a shrinking department. It takes a lot of thinking and long-term policy making to reduce this perverse yet basic economic incentive
Don't forget all the war-on-terror funding and politics that have provided even rural police departments with armored personnel carriers and the like.[1] Or outfitting police departments with tons of equipment in advance of protests planned there which then filters down into daily use. In some cities, there is so little for the "anti-terror" cops to do that they have been conscripted into arresting drunk people and pot smokers.[2]
There's another side to that, which is that overfunding of the police is coupled to underfunding of other institutions; too many social issues are framed as law-enforcement problems, and tackled with a militarized version of the law enforcement mindset.
A lot of the funding comes from seizures of cars, houses, cash, anything that can be grabbed. Then it's up to the citizen to "prove" it isn't ill-gotten goods.
I don't have any figures for local municipalities, but US Attorneys have been pretty prosperous. In 2010, the seizure total for the Feds was over $1 billion.
To me it seems that there are a lot of issues at play that led to the death of this man, but temporarily ignoring the fact that it seems hypocritical for a state to both punish gamblers while promoting a state lottery, it appears necessary that SWAT teams are required to arrest people within their own homes given the fact that people are free to own weapons and use those for protection.
I'm not saying that firearms need to be outlawed for anyone but government agencies. I'm just arguing that when people need to be arrested (lawfully or otherwise), police officers want also want to protect themselves in their line of work, so they necessarily need to create an imbalance of power for their own self-preservation. The victim was unarmed, so the use of SWAT teams certainly was unnecessary and he could have been arrested by two officers and a single patrol car, but given any other case, he might have carried a weapon and gunned down an officer.
Indeed, that’s exactly what happened to seventy-two-year-old Aaron Awtry in 2010. Awtry was hosting a poker tournament in his Greenville, South Carolina, home when police began breaking down the door with a battering ram. Awtry had begun carrying a gun after being robbed. Thinking he was about to be robbed again, he fired through the door, wounding Deputy Matthew May in both arms. The other officers opened fire into the building. Miraculously, only Awtry was hit. As he fell back into a hallway, other players reporting him asking, “Why didn’t you tell me it was the cops?” The raid team claimed they knocked and announced several times before putting ram to door, but other players said they heard no knock or announcement. When Awtry recovered, he was charged with attempted murder. As part of an agreement, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. Police had broken up Awtry’s games in the past. But on those occasions, they had knocked and waited, he had let them in peacefully, and he’d been given a $100 fine.
Summary: people who are committing minor crimes don't want to trade up to major crimes. Be reasonable and most people will be reasonable in return. The police increase the risk to themselves and to the citizens they are supposed to be protected by using unreasonable force.
> "Thinking he was about to be robbed again, he fired through the door"
Yeah, that appears to be a pretty foolish thing to do. What if it were firefighters who noticed a fire through his upstairs window? I don't think that they would just ring the bell and wait for an answer. I know that this a hypothetical situation, but it just seems a really stupid thing to just blindly fire at whatever is behind the door.
The only people who claim that the police did not first knock on the door are the friends and associates of the victim. One of the two groups is lying, and both can be lying to cover their asses. I have too little information to know whether this is an actual case of police brutality, sorry.
Edit: As a correction, the victim and his friends don't need to be lying. Perhaps the doorbell was broken, perhaps they didn't hear the police officers pounding at their door. I don't know, why should I jump to conclusions?
>> "Thinking he was about to be robbed again, he fired through the door"
>Yeah, that appears to be a pretty foolish thing to do.
Definitely. Reminded me of the part in Major Payne when the little boy is scared because he thinks there's a monster in his closet. The first time I saw this, I figured it was one of the other boys in the movie playing a prank on him and hiding in the closet. Major Payne draws his pistol and unloads it into the closet door, exclaiming "if he's still in there, he ain't happy." At this point, I was like OMG he probably killed a kid (there's no one actually in the closet). Point being, if you fire a gun through a door knowing someone is on the other side, you should be held as accountable had you aimed the gun directly at them and fired.
"The only people who claim that the police did not first knock on the door are the friends and associates of the victim."
Well, to be fair, the only people at the scene that weren't police officers were his friends and associates. He was hosting a private gathering in his residence after all.
This gets awkward. Scold me for blaming the victim, but here we have a case where the victim has refused to desist from specific criminal behavior despite multiple citations, and who fired a weapon in a populated room at someone who was neither identified nor holding a visible weapon.
When I hear about cops shooting dogs when they get the address wrong on a warrant, I worry. But in this case, well, don't go bear baiting.
People have always owned their own weapons, and if anything the percent of households with guns has declined [1]. The burden is on you to show why the increase in police militarization is necessary. What is different now that requires SWAT teams to participate in poker room raids and alcohol regulatory inspections?
What the article posits is that what has changed is not, in fact, the level of danger that police face, but that there has been a combination of mission creep and cops getting away with pushing the boundaries of excessive force. Other commenters have pointed out that there is a monetary aspect as well: departments justify bigger budgets by using personnel and equipment on more and more trivial tasks. What used to be routine enforcement and arrests become full SWAT takedowns.
> departments justify bigger budgets by using personnel and equipment on more and more trivial tasks. What used to be routine enforcement and arrests become full SWAT takedowns.
Seems that all that DHS money spread all over the country has put local police into the mindset of pork barrel spending and big government largesse.
This argument is spectacularly stupid because based on the rise of exactly these kinds of incidents, you could justify the production and distribution of automated turrets to negate the use of current SWAT tactics. You can't just stop at the perceived consequences of your supposed equilibrium point, you have to follow it all the way to the logical conclusion.
If this keeps up and/or accelerates, it's only a matter of time before someone acting in the same spirit as defense distributed throws an arduino controlled turret and either sells them on silk road, or open sources the plans and we're living in a much shittier world because of the out of control arms race accepting that the police are going to act like militant home invading thugs will provoke.
> This argument is spectacularly stupid because based on the rise of exactly these kinds of incidents, you could justify the production and distribution of automated turrets to negate the use of current SWAT tactics.
Then it's a good thing that most states have laws that prohibit owning fully-automatic firearms then.
> You can't just stop at the perceived consequences of your supposed equilibrium point, you have to follow it all the way to the logical conclusion.
Don't be absurd. If I use a semi or fully automatic weapon to protect myself against police brutality, it will only ensure that I won't get out alive.
Nice slippery-slope argument by the way, do you work at FOX News?
An automated turret is not at all the same thing as a firearm with an automatic fire mode. An assault rifle with an automatic fire select might indeed increase the likelihood the operator is killed. An automatic turret on the other hand doesn't have an operator, making it potentially quite a good deterrent to thuggish humans jacked up on authoritarianism with guns storming an area.
I assume though since you're automatically painting opposition you don't understand with the same tired old bullshit labels typical of mainstream statist standard leftists, correcting your mistakes is liable to just annoy you with more cognitive dissonance. My apologies, I won't be replying again.
I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me. You told me that you can use my spectacularly stupid argument to justify a conclusion that you don't like, well that is your problem, not mine.
I only attempt argue that, 1) given the fact that people are free to own lethal firearms within their own homes, 2) given the fact that police officers are wont to die if they get shot, 3) and given the assertion that presented with a police force, SWAT or otherwise, within the safety of their own home, threatening the suspect with arrest, the suspect can resort to irrational and sometimes violent behavior, I conclude that to maximize their self-preservation, police forces have to ensure an imbalance of power while making the arrest.
You are calling this argument spectacularly stupid, so you are going to, without having to resort to logical fallacies, show to me why my conclusion is wrong.
> I assume though since you're automatically painting opposition you don't understand with the same tired old bullshit labels typical of mainstream statist standard leftists, correcting your mistakes is liable to just annoy you with more cognitive dissonance.
That you are quick to associate me with a political position that I am not inclined to support merely betrays your confused dichotomous outlook on politics. I can't even begin to guess what a "mainstream statist standard leftist" is. I only asked the question because to my knowledge, FOX News often uses the slippery slope argument as a rhetorical device. You turn it into a political debate.
If the crime involved is not violent and the suspect has no history of assaulting police officers (or perhaps any history of violent acts), it should basically be a criminal act for the police to initiate the use of force during the apprehension.
You are making a huge leap from the presence of weapons to the use of violence against other people.
> If the crime involved is not violent and the suspect has no history of assaulting police officers (or perhaps any history of violent acts), it should basically be a criminal act for the police to initiate the use of force during the apprehension.
I think I agree.
> You are making a huge leap from the presence of weapons to the use of violence against other people.
I think police officers has to put their lives on the line. I'm not saying that SWAT teams have to use violence, I'm only saying that police officers should come prepared with semi-automatic firearms and body armor if there is a suspicion that the suspect will be armed.
Police in the U.S. carry high capacity semi-automatic pistols as a matter of course. I think they also frequently wear bullet proof vests on normal duty. Swat teams wear more armor and typically carry submachine guns that are capable of fully automatic fire.
Part of protecting people that do not have a history of violence is giving them the benefit of the doubt. Sure, there need to be lines drawn that allow the police to protect themselves, but anyone choosing to be a cop is going to be aware of the fact that they will occasionally be placed in dangerous situations.
The police officers are putting their lives on the line when they escalate a situation that does not require it. This is a non-violent crime. Send someone to take some pictures and arrest people later.
Without the SWAT team, this remains calm and less costly for the police and the taxpayer.
Firefighters/EMTs also put their lives on the line - responding to medic calls in the wrong neighborhood is dangerous, combative patients (such as those with weird blood sugar levels or medication issues), mean dogs, and so on are risks. Perhaps we should grant them special protections and reasoning to start putting people and animals down at will too. Right now if an EMT killed a combative patient or a dog, all hell would break loose on them, yet they are in danger too. Yes, police are in a different situation, but not IMO different enough to warrant free reign.
I don't know why the article didn't really discuss this, but if you know that there are armed gamblers inside and are worried that they will be a danger to you, why not just announce that you are outside, have the people come out and just wait? Storming through the door with weapons drawn SPECIFICALLY because you believe that they are armed is probably the worst piece of logic possible. You are basically causing deaths with negligence at this point. But there isn't really much of an incentive to change this process when you get to murder whatever civilian you want and take their stuff and know that even if they fight back, they will go to prison for a very very long time. I don't get why this is the way things work.
Well I don't think that the police officers risk waiting. I can think of several reasons why you don't want to have this standoff. Mainly, it would give the suspects enough time to destroy any evidence that could incriminate the suspects. Furthermore, if you are assuming that the only way for this standoff to end will be through the own volition of the suspects, then this standoff could turn into a siege and last months.
>it appears necessary that SWAT teams are required to arrest people within their own homes given the fact that people are free to own weapons and use those for protection.
No. The guy was an optometrist with a local business, your suggestion that he was some undercover cop-murderer waiting for the slightest provocation is absurd and insulting. He had every incentive to maintain civility in his neighborhood/town. There is very little reason to believe that he would have reacted violently to any of the following alternative tactics:
- A phone call from an investigator requesting a meeting.
- A knock on the door from a pair of polite/professional investigators.
- Police could have waited for him to leave in a car and had patrolmen stop him on the street.
>I'm just arguing that when people need to be arrested (lawfully or otherwise)
How can you defend SWAT as a valid way to make an unlawful arrest? Have I misunderstood you?
SWAT is only appropriate for hostage and other situations where danger is imminent. In other cases of people "needing arrest", the use of SWAT is abusive.
> No. The guy was an optometrist with a local business, your suggestion that he was some undercover cop-murderer waiting for the slightest provocation is absurd and insulting. He had every incentive to maintain civility in his neighborhood/town. There is very little reason to believe that he would have reacted violently to any of the following alternative tactics:
Hindsight is 20/20. I will probably agree with you that if the police force did proper research on the suspect, then they would have chosen a different approach. However, I don't understand why they didn't so I can say very little about it. Perhaps it requires a structural change within the police force to accomplish this.
> How can you defend SWAT as a valid way to make an unlawful arrest? Have I misunderstood you?
You misunderstand me. Unlawful arrests are not good, but they happen anyway. The fact that the arrest is unlawful is not always known to the officers performing the arrest, so at that point in time and space, the legality of the arrest has become irrelevant.
>Hindsight is 20/20. I will probably agree with you that if the police force did proper research on the suspect, then they would have chosen a different approach.
This wasn't some spur-of-the-moment action. The investigators planned this operation, one of them had befriended Culosi. They don't get to use the "hindsight" defense here. I would argue that the investigator entrapped the Culosi by upping the ante to the point that made it a felony charge.
I think we can just call it murder. "Entrapment" implies that the end result was that he was punished in what would have been a lawful way if he had committed the crime of his own accord.
Entrapment seems to be a common tactic. The details of most of the arrests of would-be terrorists that they catch in the US are clear cases of entrapment. The FBI/NYPD/some paid informant finds some antisocial/inept guy who's floundering in his life and try to radicalize him and then give him a plan and tools to carry out some terrorist act.
Pay attention to the details next time you read about a foiled terror plot in the US. A couple of them seem to have been legit but most follow the pattern.
[Edit] I became curious about what happened to this guy so I Googled him and found this: http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2013/04/26/alleged-taliban-sy... looks like they threw the book at him and sent him to prison for 8 years for having fired a gun at a firing range. [/Edit]
Entrapment laws are a defense from prosecution, and they're different in every state. Normally it's only entrapment if the cop is enticing someone to break a law he wouldn't have broken otherwise. In this case if the guy was betting on games every Sunday the jury probably would have taken a dim view of an entrapment defense.
The shooting is another issue. The cop is saying it wasn't deliberate, and that's probably true.
I don't know the applicable state law, but from the story he was betting 50 dollars on games every Sunday. The cop spent several months pretending to be his friend and convincing him to bet more and more.
It seems to me that he would never have bet anywhere near that much without several months of persuasion by the police.
Therefore, if it weren't for the cop pressuring him it is very unlikely he would have ever broken that particular law.
Granted it's a moot point, because as you say entrapment is a legal defense and the would-be defendant is dead.
Reposting this from the killed-dog-thread. It certainly won't help when the SWAT team is already in your home, but for the creeping sense of out of control cops everywhere:
"Most of us carry video cameras in our pockets now. Filming police needs to become ubiquitous. There should be no police officer in the United States that doesn't know that at any time they could be being filmed and held accountable for their actions by the public they are paid to protect and serve. It is one case where I think constant citizen surveillance could be useful. After a few years of it and constant court rulings that it is protected, perhaps cops would stop yelling at people and arresting them for doing nothing wrong. Yes, I'm talking to everyone on this site. If you are walking back from grabbing a burrito and see the cops "talking to" a homeless person on the street, or pulling over a driver for running a red light or detaining someone, /you/ need to stop for 5-10 minutes, get out your camera phone, and start filming. Please. For the love of a police state run amuck."
By the way, my father recalls from when my country was a dictatorship that "you couldn't take photos of police or military, or you were arrested". Democratic U.S.A. is doing the same..
You may be harrassed if you film cops, but it is plainly legal[1], and the courts have recently begun to be more aggressive about slapping down municipalities that try to restrict it.[2] Normalizing it will go a long way to keeping police from thinking they can harass activist-types that are filming cops. I have been filming cops with copwatch groups from the days we had to carry big shoulder mounted video cameras.
Like I said, I have filmed a lot of police interactions. I have been harassed many times, but never arrested. I /have/ been arrested for obstruction of legal process once. Ironically, it was a time when I wasn't filming and just standing off to the side taking notes.
If you do get arrested, you can both win damages for yourself and often change the entire written rules of a police department by suing.
But again, normalizing this will go a long way to people not getting harassed and cops knowing that they could be being filmes in any public interaction at any time.
I am arguing only that you suggest harassment is the worst that will happen. There is much much much documentation that the worst is far worse than harassment. I am not disputing the potential (not at all as certain as you seem to think) of getting damages even. Merely that arrest and court is far beyond harassment. I agree with the normalizing of the circumstances aspect of your argument.
Basically I am saying the fact that you haven't been arrested does not in any way (logically, evidentially or even anecdotally) suggest that this the case one should prepare for.
The fact that people get arrested for exercising their rights is a fantastic reason to exercise those same rights as often as possible. Would you have told civil rights protestors to stop sit-ins or marches?
Arrested with potential consequences is not the same as the mere "harassment" claimed by the parent. This is the only point I was making. I think you misunderstood my intent.
Thankfully those (grand jury...) charges were thrown out. The judge established, at least in Maryland, that police DO NOT have a reasonable right to privacy while carrying out their duties in public.
Is there a service to record live streams online (easily, cheap/free) from phones? The key is to send the live stream out for storage. Common "we'll sync after the video is recorded" services are no good if you get your phone destroyed half way through trying to record.
I just read about a service that covers this use-case (sorry, I can't for the life of me find it now). It streams low-quality video to a server to cover for the eventuality that the phone is destroyed. I'm pretty sure it was some sort of open-source software that wasn't Bambuser.
On slow connections you can use Robotsanywhere. No audio, but it will work well at 1G/2G speeds. If you can't find it on google play email robotsanywhere@robots-everywhere.com to get the latest build and/or source.
1. Don't buy sparkling water if you're a college student
2. Don't bet with friends because an arbitrary threshold of about $2k warrants your execution
3. Don't tell American citizens that their government abuses its power, or you'll be charged with espionage
4. It's probably a bad idea to bear arms these days, because saying "Officer, I have a weapon in the trunk of my car" might give him reason to shoot you in self defense
5. You don't actually have free speech anymore, so be careful about that. If you threaten to shoot up a school, even jokingly and totally within your rights, you will be incarcerated for half a year before your trial. And who knows if the judge will let you off? You just have to pray for one who knows and abides by the constitution.
3. Don't tell American citizens that their government abuses its power, or you'll be charged with espionage
Point 3 is patently false. All of my Facebook friends, and I, regularly say that the United States government abuses its power, some from the right, some from the left, and many from a general freedom-loving perspective, and we all go on posting as we please. All of these statements are exaggerations. Many of these statements refer to problems that are much worse in other places. (If you think that arbitrary abuse by the police is the worst it can be in the United States, you haven't traveled very much.) Sure, protest fearlessly about any abuse you find anywhere. But don't lose sight of reality.
AFTER EDIT: People who follow my comments on Hacker News
will be well aware that I participate in public protests here in the United States, in full view of TV news cameras and police observers. (The last protest I participated in was across the street from the headquarters of the Minneapolis police department.) I am an equal-opportunity democracy movement activist, desiring more power for the people in every country of the world. As one of the grandchild comments to this comment has now said, it's silly to exaggerate conditions in the United States, as that just robs a comment of credibility. If you want to establish a better trend line for United States policy, be specific in your policy proposals, and make your policy proposals public fearlessly, early and often. Don't be an anonymous coward. Put your name behind your convictions.
People power democracy movements that nudge countries from dictatorship to democracy can really work. I have seen it done. A successful movement for greater freedom requires great courage, and a degree of social trust among the movement participants that is not easy to find. Allow me to repeat advice I have shared here on Hacker News before. If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the free, downloadable publications of the Albert Einstein Institution,
remembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from. You can find publications in more than a dozen languages there to share with your friends around the world.
Ahhh yes, the "these problems are worse in other places" Okay, you're right, so lets never try to fix them. Because Russian police are abusive we should count ourselves lucky that our own police force isn't AT LEAST that bad. Sure, they go out of their way to murder people for no reason, but we can't be man about that, we should simply be thankful that there are worse police agencies that exist.
And yeah, your point that the govt won't abuse the shit out of its power if you are a whistleblower makes me wonder if you've been living under a rock recently. I imagine you don't think it was any big deal that the US coerced other countries into not allowing the Bolivian President use their airspace because the US was upset with Bolivia offering Snowden asylum? But yeah, you're right man, no abuses whatsoever will occur if you are a whistleblower...
The type of self awareness one would have to lack to get to the point where they are making the point you just made is staggering.
Oh yeah it's all much worse in other places. We're still "better" than all the dictatorships and authoritarian governments in the world, and that makes it all just fine and dandy. The only people losing sight of reality are the ones deluded into thinking that America/ns is/are immune to what appears to be a fundamental feature of power: corruption.
By point 3 he meant actions by USG whistle blowers with access to classified information, not a civilian's facebook account.
There is a problem with broad statements like the grandparent comment. College students buy water everyday without trouble, people own guns without being harassed daily, people makes bets daily without any trouble, people make joking threats daily without incident. There is plenty bad going on without the need for exaggerations and outright lies.
If you want reality to change, you have to accept reality. Skewing it to the most sensationalistic interpretation only makes it easier to dismiss.
There is some irony in chiding someone for hyperbole while claiming 'at least it's not as bad as some other places', an argument that can be made of almost any aspect of the human experience.
I mean, if you set the bar as low as "better than living in a dictatorship" instead of "comparable to western democracy -foo-", you're engaging in some pretty solid resetting of the frame of reference.
If you're going to talk economics, politics, sociology, or just about any massive and complex systems, you cannot avoid broad statements. I dislike them, but that's just the way it is. I notice a lot on HN that broad statements generally are called out and (usually without being defensive) clarified in the discussion.
However, in this case, there is no clarification needed. Compare the United States across whatever subjective experience and online indices you can find (economic freedom, press freedom, happiness, quality of life, etc but take them with a grain of salt) and make up your own mind.
After having traveled a little bit and lived in circumstances very different from my current life in SF, I have become less concerned with the water, guns, bets, and bad jokes and more concerned about the creeping changes in massive institutions like the US government. After all, one of the hallmarks of a democracy is how it protects the minorities from the tyranny of the majority.
> If you're going to talk economics, politics, sociology, or just about any massive and complex systems, you cannot avoid broad statements.
Of course not, but they need to semi-accurately reflect the way things are going on a broad scale. If someone steps on my toe at the convenience store and doesn't apologize, I don't start a rally cry about how America is full of toe-hating assholes. If it starts happening systemically then I might be more willing to make that charge.
Point 1 is also patently false: I have bought sparkling water and I'm not a felon! Obviously the GP is not making logical declarations. To stay SAFEST, one must avoid sparkling water, threatening jokes, and any statements the DOJ would disapprove of. Your friends on Facebook do not invalidate that point.
Also don't be black, poor, trans, or a sex worker (and if you're black, poor and trans, you'd better dress like a nun, or the police will read you as a sex worker). People in those categories usually don't even make it as far as an outraged Salon article.
And lets not pretend that it isn't a stereotype without warrant. Not going to go into the racial factors, more the cultural. It's just simply more likely that blacks will be criminals in certain areas - humans have evolved to generalize things like this for survival's sake.
My family is Mormon (LDS) and two of my brother's are cops, so we definitely have this covered.
What I can say is that cops seem to get indoctrinated as part of their training about the rule of law and the need to enforce laws "because it's the law" without thought or common sense applied to each situation.
So Shaq, Matt Damon and Steven Seagal participated in SWAT raids. Is this for celebrities only or anyone can sign up?
Not that I would like to participate though.
You have to convince a sheriff to deputize you first. For some reason this is easier for celebrities. Go figure. What does that say about the judgement of the sheriff that approve that sort of thing? Not sure what a sheriff's responsibilities are in the US system, but if that's the same person responsible for deciding that a SWAT team is necessary to investigate a poker game going on in someone's house, it's not surprising to see poor decisions being made in that area too.
The article mentions one case where a judge refused to issue a search warrant for a narcotics investigation and instead the police brought representatives from the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and raided the place with a swat team to conduct an alcohol inspection. What did they find?
Two sample bottles of beer that weren't labeled as samples and a bottle of vodka in the office. The fourth circuit court of appeals upheld the search. According to the article: So for now, in the Fourth Circuit, sending a SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Americans vote for those who are tough on crime. I think CATO estimated (on the high end) about 40,000 SWAT/paramilitary raids a year and the public perception is that the targets are all criminals. To them this is just "acceptable collateral damage."
The problem is the public thinks that those being targeted are all dirty evil criminals, and I also think America as a whole doesn't have an "innocent before guilty" mentality. It's not just the American leaders that have corrupt minds. It's also a lot of Americans, who are supporting this sort of stuff.
The media is also not helping at all, and making the problem worse, because they are usually on the government's side when it comes to such issues.
The presumption of innocence is not directly enshrined in the constitution, and in the case of some crimes, like rape, has been deliberately and explicitly weakened.
This is a bit off topic for this thread but given that you brought it up:
It is hard for me to look at, say, Steubenville[1] (to take just the most publicized of several examples that I've seen in the news lately) and understand how anyone can suggest that accused rapists aren't given a presumption of innocence in our society. The blame heaped on rape victims is often tremendous, even when everyone knows that it happened.
(In the Steubenville case, there were widely shared photos documenting what happened to the young woman in question and at least one video of a guy at the same party laughing about what his friends had done to her, and most of the local community evidently still strongly sided with her rapists.)
There are dozens of examples in local jurisdictions, as well as lots of policies in private institutions. Unfortunately, someone as yet needs to talk about this who doesn't manage to come across as an angry male loser. AFAIK, this hasn't penetrated the popular consciousness yet.
If you look at the community of Steubenville, yes.
If you look at the wider picture of media coverage, quite the opposite. Reddit started the witch trial pretty much instantly, with some of the most upvoted comments being for life in prison or worse.
Look at the backlash when CNN referred to the accused as boys with a formerly promising future whose lives were now ruined. God forbid you show an ounce of sympathy for accused rapists, because it's impossible to be sympathetic to the victim and not want anyone to go through the hell that the rest of their collective life is going to be.
I had a very charged discussion with friends just the other night about this very idea. I argued that even if a defendant has the resources to get to a jury trial, the jury is prejudiced against the "criminal" from the start.
It turned out, however, that each person in the room had either been wrongly accused of a crime or knew someone that had been railroaded by the system. They knew that the prosecution wasn't perfect. My sample size is 6 people, myself included, and we are all fairly educated.
Regarding the media, everyone in the room agreed that the Nancy Graces of the world are actively harming our society...
FWIW, I was on a jury for the first and (so far) only time, about 2 years ago. It wasn't a big, flashy murder or rape case, just a guy being accused of breaking into a cop car and stealing a flashlight and a handheld radio. But, I found that the other jurors, by and large, took the "innocent until proven guilty" thing VERY seriously. I know that most of us thought he was "probably" guilty, but in the end, we actually acquitted him on all charges because we didn't believe the State had proven he was guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Granted it's just one anecdote about one jury on one case in North Carolina, but this jury was not prejudiced against the "criminal" from the start. And, if anything, by the end, most of us were biased against the State for being (or appearing to be) some combination of: incompetent (the investigator from the Sheriff's department), abusive / a plain dick ( the prosecutor), and/or dishonest (the cop who had his car broken into).
Unfortunately this is more being dumb on crime. Just think about all the criminals they could have investigated insted of thus amatur rides.
Her in Norway its can sometime take 10-20 minutes just to get thru to the police if you have an emergency at night. I hope the local SWAT time at least is out chasing real cals and real criminals instead of shutting security guards and raiding the local veterans clubs for some $5 dollar poker fee.
There have been incidents like the Oaksterdam raid where the DEA took up all SWAT resources for a raid of a civillian, unarmed (and legal state-wise) marijuana cooperative. Meanwhile, there was a school shooting minutes away. [1]
The reality is that crime is falling in the United States and has been for a while (Freakanomics has a decent piece about the relationship of crime and the availability of abortion, with a time lag in the former that showed a correlation with the latter) and I think this paramilitarization is an attempt to fill up budgets and give reasons so that they aren't reduced in the future.
There's debate about whether increased availability of abortion really accounts for the decline in crime; one alternative hypothesis is that reduced rates of childhood exposure to lead (mostly from leaded gasoline and the resultant exhaust) is at least as responsible.
Sadly, yes, it is the America that America wants, as far as I can tell.
I think this is where efforts to fight these problems fall down. They're almost all based on the assumption that the populace doesn't want this stuff to happen, but that the government pushes it through by abusing power, subverting democracy, etc.
But from what I see, this is not the case. Most Americans want this. Whether it's gun-wielding maniacs, drug dealers, or international terrorist masterminds, they feel unsafe, and want the government to help. They like heavily-armed SWAT teams available at a moment's notice. They like the government spying on every communication they can get their hands on. They like x-ray machines and body scanners in airports.
There is a sizable minority where sanity remains, but it is a minority. I think that efforts to fight these problems need to recognize this, and realize that you have to convince the people as your primary action. Fighting the government won't help, because the people will insist that these things be done, as long as the majority feels this way.
> Sadly, yes, it is the America that America wants, as far as I can tell.
Many young people coming out of school seem to have no conception of rights. To them, it's excusable for rights to be violated if they feel enough justified anger. They are unclear on the concept that rights apply to people and situations in ways they may not like.
Well, they did just come out of schools where metal detectors and police patrolling the halls was the enforced norm. They rode to school in busses with cameras that watched their every move.
How can we expect them to suddenly expect freedom, when they've never had it?
Is this any surprise for people who grew up in a country where invading countries on false pretexts was seen as the right thing to do, where criticizing the government was seen as bad no matter what the reasons are, and where the threat of terrorism is somehow hyped up far beyond the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation in the Cold War?
I saw this coming when the WTC rubble was still smoking. The government could have potentially worked to calm down the populace, but instead they amplified the fear. We've been paying the price ever since.
Thanks for that! We're just now trying to establish lives for ourselves in one of the worst economic climates since the great depression. That's hard enough without having the responsibility of fixing politics and government foisted upon us as well...
I think he was actually saying that this responsibility should be on the 30-, 40- and 50-year-olds, who are already in the working world and are old enough to have seen (and voted for/against) several of the people in all levels of government who have made the choices that brought us here.
For now, focus on your life, and getting yourself in a position to contribute to the movement in the future.
> To them, it's excusable for rights to be violated if they feel enough justified anger.
I don't think this is specific to young people, or to the present time. Everyone will be very noble when talking about rights in the abstract, but they quickly throw that away when it's the rights of a specific group they don't like. I was struck by it after the London riots last year, when there were loud calls for looters to be punished beyond what the judicial system normally allows. You can see the same attitude to terrorism.
It's not that America wants this, it's that the politicians we elect do not keep their promises. Those that try are forced out, shaken down, relegated to stay at the bottom of the ladder. In our current political climate, a politician must barter ethics and morality for the power to do what they promised. And by then, it's too late, they're already gone.
That is a problem with the people who vote. We either will not vote for people who fail to over-promise, or fail to continue to support elected officials who make reasonable efforts to follow through, or both.
They do not "like" it. It's just that, to be very blunt, most people are basically peasants at heart. They're going to go along with whatever the king says. Twenty years ago, on that side of the line on a map, the people believed in capitalism, while on the other side the people believed in communism. On this side of the line people believed in this god, on that side, they believe in that god.
It has nothing to do with some kind economists' "rational utilization maximization" function and everything to do with basically a "k-nearest neighbours" algorithm on their social graph for assigning beliefs.
And that is precisely why control of the media is so important.
You think trained submission to authority is scary? How about being trained for constantly being monitored and brain washed?
[…] as much as the program offers freedom and continuity, it also comes with a substantial monitoring component. The iPad keeps teachers and parents constantly informed about what children are doing, what they have learned and how they are progressing.
Better technology in education is clearly the future and, in many ways, the way to go. The mind boggles with possibilities. But, but… we need to put much more thought into it than just the implementation of another nifty feature. We also need better laws and regulations that constrain the authority of the, uhm, authorities. And a government we can trust would be nice too.
The way things stand today, this article just scared the bejesus out of me.
This is a somewhat ugly and self-aggrandizing view. It's easy to let people you don't know and will never meet become sub-human, but it's dangerous and harmful. The relevant xkcd is of course, http://xkcd.com/610/.
I don't presume to know why most people are not particularly vocal on these matters, but it's certainly not because they lack critical thought.
If someone says "most people are peasants", why would that be a statement about their personality, rather than their situation? To me that's still an objection to something read into it.
It's not wrong though. Most people don't care about politics. They don't research economics or anything like that, at best they hear the news sometimes and discuss stuff with their friends.
That doesn't make them sub-human. There is no real incentive to care a lot about politics or do all the research and thinking necessary to come to correct conclusions. It's not like your vote is going to change the outcome of the election.
But no it's not terribly self-aggrandizing to assume that most people don't have a lot of interest or education in politics. It's true.
This is precisely it: its not economically beneficial to be involved in politics, unless you basically make it your absolute sole concern. That is to say, there are clear benefits to becoming a politician, or a lobbyist, or interest group. However, just becoming "informed" generally has a lot of negatives (depression), with no real positives (as you said, its not like you can do much about it other than complain). So unless your goal is to make a living in politics in one way or another, it is completely rational to be apathetic towards politics and put your focus somewhere else.
>This is precisely it: its not economically beneficial to be involved in politics
That was the case at other times and places too. And their solution to that, was to shame citizens that only cared for what's economically beneficial.
The solution is to make active participation in politics (= active citizenship) a virtue that people want to be identified with in the same way being "in fashion", "in shape" or "rich" is one.
Of course we have the contrary. Active participation is actually discouraged -- except if you are a career politician.
A huge, enormous part of this is having a vigilant press. It's impossible for everyone to individually do investigative reporting on every relevant issue. You may be able to shame people into reading good investigative reporting but first somebody has to write it. That is really where we've failed today: People get their news from outlets that run stories about Obama's birth certificate and what color Phil Zimmerman's lawyer's tie is and what a shame it is that the cops have dirty shotguns (never mind that the dirt is the blood of innocent civilians' innocent puppies) so now we had better give them a trillion more dollars for additional military surplus equipment or the terrorists will win.
Job One should really be to solve the problem that the most popular news network is also the most factually inaccurate.
The xkcd presents a straw man. Occasionally but rarely I have seen "false consciousness" and "you are not awake" type claims as presented in the comic being made on this board. However, these types of claims are rare in comparison to complaints about specific majority viewpoints that reveal a complete breakdown of abstract thinking or simply absurd thinking.
One of the strongest times I've ever been sympathetic to the "people are peasants" viewpoints was during my college years in Alabama. During that time Alabama finally voted on removing anti-miscegenation laws from its books. 3/4 of whites voted to keep them (the removal passing due only to a few whites like myself and the large voting block of blacks). The people were particularly vocal and they lacked critical thought.
If it's "ugly and self-aggrandizing" to assume that, for example, my post-doc advisor's parents should have been allowed to marry (and by extension him to exist) then I hope my ugliness runs straight to the bone and my arrogance knows no end.
Here in Brazil not only people are usually like that (the "shocking" protests here, were still a minority... 1 million people in total, spread over the entire country, when the country has 200 million people... Compare that with european countries with a history of population fueled government changes, that regularly do protests with more than 1 million people and have less population), but people in Brazil are PROUD of it.
Here when you attempt to talk about politics, a common reply is: "Dude, I don't care, and I like it that way, don't come with that politics bullshit toward me."
This applies even during the elections...
In fact, here vote is mandatory, because when it wasn't, less than 5% voted at all, but making vote mandatory only made the thing poisonous, people vote because they must, usually on whoever they see most on TV, or some random candidate or another, if you ask a random brazillian who he voted for as representative, most of them don't remember at all, not even the party they voted for.
Also we have plenty of proof, that all elections since electronics ballot were introduced here, were cheated, and people DON'T CARE. I show videos of people hacking our machines and showing how they can steer election to whatever way they want, and most people react with complete apathy, they feel that politics is irrelevant, that all politicians are the same, thus it does not matter if whoever wins won cheating or not, because the result is not important to them.
Obligatory Douglas Adams quote, from Thanks For All The Fish:
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"
"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."
Ford shrugged again.
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."
When you are a non-voter you can fix your situation by paying a fine.
If you stay non-voter, you cannot get hired by government, cannot ask loans from government owned banks (or from the government itself), cannot get issued a new passport, cannot get issued a new id, cannot vote, cannot study in government schools and universities, your companies cannot provide services to the government, and you are considered a draft dodger (ie: for example if you want to join a private school that requires you to have completed military service, the school would be breaking its own rules if it allow you to study there)
If you do that in three elections in a row (here we have elections every two years, thus this is 6 years) your document related to voting is revoked. (meaning that you become de facto stateless, although de jure you are still brazillian).
"government" here apply to all levels (example: the part where you cannot join government schools, apply to federal, state and city schools)
Also this applies to overseas citizens (you must to the embassy and vote there).
You can "justify" your vote, this is showing up into any random voting zone (not necessarily the one where you are registered) and explaining why you won't vote, but usually the only explanation accepted is that you are away from your zone (ie: if you are into a city where you are not registered as resident).
It's scary, because what do you do when 58% of the total electorate tick the "None of the above" option?
2001, 2005, and 2010 UK elections had less than 70% turn out. That's a scary 30% to 35% of people forced to tick a box.
I'm not sure having that many people randomly ticking a box is good for democracy, especially because it's probably not a random choice but determined things like position on the ballot paper.
In a strange twist, I think one of the problems is that the more we celebrate the American ideal and elevate it above other nations, etc., the more difficult it becomes for people to mobilize for change, or even believe that change is necessary.
It's a strange groupthink that makes anything our government does the de facto morally superior action. It's an inherent trust by the masses that turn questioners into conspiracy theorists. The irony, of course, is that mentaility among the populace is perhaps the single most destructive threat to a true democracy, which demands vigilance.
And all of this is propped up by a corporate-political state that controls a media, which works tirelessly to maintain the image while also distracting us to no end with trivialities.
They do not "like" it. It's just that, to be very blunt, most people are basically peasants at heart.
I don't see any reason to believe this is true. The problem is most people don't have any contact with the police, and they're using a mental model that's about fifteen years out of date. They don't know what's happening out there. It's hard to imagine, but most normal people still get their news from television.
Well, "like" is a subjective term but for the most part people support it.
I hear all the time..."It's for the better. It allows the government to keep track of the bad guys and if I have to be inconvenienced a few times out of the year that I travel than so be it."
Or..."All I use email for is work and talking with family. If they want to read that stuff they can, I have nothing to hide. If it helps keep me safe then I'm comfortable."
And the there's..."God forbid we have another 9/11 because too many people are worried about what the government does. There are somethings the government has to do in secrete, there are things they have to lie to us about in order to keep us safe."
I'm 23 years old and I can't tell you where this mentality came from. I know when I was growing up my father showed me how to grow my own food, hunt, use a gun in a respectful mannor and always doubt the government. He told me that violence never solved any of his problems and it's doubtful it'd solve any of mine. He said in order for anyone to be safe they must have their freedom. The freedom to do whatever it is they seek to do. The government is only there to remove that freedom. They want to stifle your ambitions and control how you live.
I know I'm not alone but I'm afraid we are outnumbered.
I think it's sad how a default distrust of the government gets one painted as a crazy gun-toting militiaman, or a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist. These are after all, the people who founded America, not out of paranoia, but from deep reflection on the nature and history of government.
Default distrust everyone is one thing. But when you single out government (as if the "government" where a thing and not just comprised of people) and not recognizing government is a symptom of more fundamental causes that I'm gonna "default distrust you as a crazy at best, or ignorant at worst".
People comprising the government are not "just" people.
They may have personality traits that compel them to seek out high-power positions.
They may suppress their natural good intentions because where they work, "things are done that way and everybody does that". After several years of such cognitive dissonance, they may just completely change personality-wise.
What a ridiculous straw man you've thrown up here. Government isn't singled out because it is somehow distinct from the people. It's singled out because it has defacto power over my person in a way no individual does. Furthermore, that power is recursive, which is why you see so few whistleblowers actually speaking about unconstitutional and illegal action behind closed doors. We can argue about the causes all day, but the dangers of government overreach are far more sinister than anything an individual actor can do.
Fascinating - I've honestly never actually considered that.
How do you believe that social media and the like are playing into this long standing control of the media? What are the implications for the future (of both society and social media)?
My thoughts exactly. One way of changing public opinion would be to use the same tactics that the opposition uses. Mainly taking back the airwaves and presenting unbiased information, rather than pre-chewed, here's what you should think, distillation of ideas. Unfortunately that takes tons of money and those with the money aren't going to do something that takes their own power away. Fortunately there are future generations that are more apt to find their info on the internet, which isn't perfect, but at least there are many perspectives presented. That is why it is vitally important that we continue to evolve our free networks, whether it be darknets or balloon nets, or whatever.
> ...find their info on the internet, which isn't perfect, but at least there are many perspectives presented
But how many people will actually go out of their way to look for those perspectives? The down side of having a thousand voices speak is that you can easily listen to twenty you agree with, and ignore two hundred opponents. I know I do that a lot of the time.
> Fortunately there are future generations that are more apt to find their info on the internet, which isn't perfect, but at least there are many perspectives presented.
Oh please. Compared to what you find on the Internet, FOX looks like a paragon of bias-free and rational reporting. Look no further than the recent rash of conspiracy theorists on HN.
What fascinates me about this is that the SWAT team and the spies are people too. Which sounds obvious but it isn't. Take a guy off the street and he believes about himself, and the government believes about him, that he needs to be surveilled constantly and if he acts suspiciously, violently confronted. But what if that guy is a bureaucrat or a policeman himself? What happens in the recruitment/training process to turn a person from one of the watched into one of the watchers? Does he flip back whenever he clocks out for the day? Are the cops happy to know that they or their families could find a SWAT team on their doorsteps one day for no apparent reason? Are the spooks happy to know that another spook is reading their families emails and judging them? The whole situation is so surreal as to defy easy comprehension.
Bad things happen to other people, and sometimes it's easier to get their job done if they skirt the rules a bit. The target-du-jour would be fine if they hadn't been doing activity-du-jour anyways, so it's not like the person didn't deserve it.
Few believe that it will happen to them.
Humans are really good at denial, rationalization and ignoring the plight of people they do not directly care about.
This type of thing is well studied in e.g. the Stanford Prison Experiment. People's behavior is far more influenced by the environment and circumstances they are in than by their beliefs or opinions.
People are constantly drinking the koolaid, and readily. They want to fit in, want their boss to like them, want to do as well as their colleagues, and don't want to confront anyone. It's the human condition, and takes effort and introspection to do otherwise.
I think the conclusion of the article nails what's at the heart of the issue. Most of the country is either left or right, and is perfectly comfortable with paramilitarized police forces being used against 'the other side'.
America's polarization is likely deliberately promoted by the elites. When a society is occupied by infighting over wedge issues it's not looking at the big picture and power can be more easily consolidated. In Rwanda, the colonialists arbitrarily split the population into Hutus and Tutsi "ethnicities" then showed favoritism to one group. They eventually got infighting which diverted energy from possible insurgence.
The colonialists emphasized the split for political gains, and there must have been some arbitrariness in assigning each person to exactly one category, but they certainly didn't pull the distinction out of thin air. Just look at the pictures in the infobox in their respective Wikipedia articles.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
Ok so now we can all see why the founders created a union of states, rather than "America". The correct place to address topics that "America" can't agree on (clearly this community doesn't agree with the "America" that we're talking about) is at the state level. It's a much easier task to get a smaller group of people to agree on something than a large one, and if I could move to a state that had some sane regulations on police power I would probably move there.
Does anyone else feel that perhaps a lot of what we're seeing is a case of "Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them"? As I look back on all of the history education I received in school (the compulsory part, not college), it occurs to me that it was largely a lot of propaganda. With the exception of black slavery, a brief mention of WWII internment camps for Japanese-Americans, and some ambivalence over the war in Vietnam, there's hardly any mention of anything the United States has done which is bad.
And unfortunately, this is all the history education the average voter has.
Here in Brazil even the black slavery part is propaganda, using half truths and exaggerations to portray slavery as result of monarchy and monarchy as absolute evil.
Professional historians already found out that slavery here is not a black and white issue, but also found that the republican government made law that schools were to teach anti-monarchy propaganda, even if it meant using half-truths about how slavery worked here.
As far as I know, the last Brazilian emperor Pedro II fought against slavery all his life, and slavery was abolished during his reign. At which point the rich planters turned to republicanism and instigated a military coup that deposed the emperor and made Brazil a republic. I find it amazing that republican propaganda would attempt to blame the monarchy for slavery!
Here, schools are obliged to teach that who abolished slavery was Princess Isabel, like if she was some sort of heroine and the emperor had nothing to do with it, also all the other anti-slavery laws he passed, are usually dismissed (for example, one of the laws the emperor passed was prohibiting the slavery of children of slaves, schools here dismiss that law by saying that it is so impratical that noone would obey anyway, without even giving proof if people obeyed or not).
Also, several of the things done in the first years of the republic were for example rename streets and parks that had any relation to the monarchy or slavery (even if it had to do with slavery abolition)...
During the school I (and everyone else I asked) was taught that Emperor Pedro I independence was shit because he did not abolished slavery with it, and thus if existed non-free people the country was not free at all and still a pawn of Portugal (as with one thing had to do with the other), and all school books give much emphasis on how slavery was not abolished during the independence... I even saw one book that teach (Wrongly) that during US independence they abolished slavery, as a sort of "proof" of how true republics are inherently better because they get rid of slavery.
Also, NONE of the history books mention slave demograhics, and only teach about plantation slavery (that was really akin to US slavery), I don't found a single school book that mentions other forms of slavery (like voluntary indentured servitude), or urban slavery (that in Brazil was the majority, despite most of the free population living in rural areas), or that only 1% of the slaves were actually chained into the infamous "Senzalas" (plantation slave barracks) that he books teach so much about (all history books explain of all evils of the "Senzalas").
Also, not one single book mention who broughts the slaves here in first place (it was not white people... the brazillian first generation slaves were almost all war prisioners or imprisoned criminals that africans came here to sell... Yes, they came here, many people believe portuguese bought the slaves at Africa, this of course happened, but was not the normal course of action, black slavers came to Brazil in portuguese ships, bringing the slaves they wanted to sell here).
Also most school books here don't talk at all about Pedro II technology achievements for example (even in Campinas where I lived most of my life, people don't know that most of public colleges there were made by decree of Pedro II, neither they know that Campinas was the second city in the world to have a telephone system, that Pedro II in person brought there after visiting Mr. Bell in the US during his vacation).
It is this way. I think largely in part due to the way that the textbooks and curriculums are put together. It all seems to funnel through some group in Texas for 'approval,' IIRC. I'll bet that sticking to much about the bad things that America has done.
Anecdote time:
1) I remember reading about what US did to the Native Americans, but I remember it being rather dry reading. It was presented more as a series of facts rather than, "this was an evil thing that we shouldn't do again." "Oh yea, by the way, all of the women and children were slaughtered. Moving on..."
2) We never discussed anything more recent than maybe WW2 in history. The only exception here is that in high school you could choose, Pre- or Post-Civil War US History. I ended up choosing pre-Civil War.
3) One of my history teachers in 7th or 8th grade would add some flavor to the texts. Things like disagreeing with the book's assertions that Ben Franklin modelled the Contintental Congress after Native American political organization. His assertion was that the Native Americans were seen as inferior, so even if there was influence from them, it wasn't conscious, or openly admitted to.
From what I understand Texas and California have the most school districts and buy the most textbooks so what goes for them goes for the rest of the country.
I'm studying applied math at an almost exclusively STEM college. I've taken one history class (European history from 1300-1600) and will not be taking any others.
However, I wouldn't consider my public history education to be "largely a lot of propaganda". I did take the advanced (AP) history courses at a public high school in Texas, and I might have just been lucky and great teachers, but my teachers discussed:
-British/US troops infecting Native Americans with smallpox by giving them infected blankets
-Trail of Tears and how Andrew Jackson was generally pretty horrible to Native Americans
-Wounded Knee Massacre, and in general how much we (as Americans) screwed over the native people
-a little bit about eugenics in the US
-Watergate scandal
-showed us a documentary about how Walmart achieves such low prices by brutal business practices (and has hurt many American companies by moving production to China)
in addition to your points above. I don't feel like my history education (solely from public school) was "largely a lot of propaganda".
AP is a whole different best for any class, much less history! I took AP US and non-AP World history in high school. The depth and breadth of material covered was just ridiculously, obscenely different between the two. I'm not sure what graduating high school even means these days if you don't have a bunch of AP credits, but it certainly doesn't make you an informed citizen with basic competencies.
One of your examples is about a private business. All but one of the others describe simply the brutality of colonization. It wouldn't be good propaganda if it looks 100% squeaky clean.
Think about what meaningful questions are left unanswered. Why is it that any serious examination of the US' covert wars across the world is skipped entirely? Why is the entire era 1945-1991 painted in communist vs capitalist terms? The US participation in WW2 is reduced to "we saved europe and asia from hitler and japanese imperialism".
The overarching theme is of American moral superiority, unassailable founding principles, and a government by the people, for the people.
None of those are true, and I am thankful we live in an age when access to the writings of accurate historians is just a click away for those who care enough to discover.
I learned about the covert wars in South America. I also learned about the establishment of Israel after WWII, and how US / Allied Forces were involved in that, the Palestinian perspective, the 6-day war and the establishment of Israel as a dominant military power.
The only major stuff I think I missed out on was the history of US involvement in Iran (of which I later learned in College history classes). But global covert actions (and not-so-covert: ie Vietnam War) during the Cold War era was definitely taught to me in general. High School History may have missed a few countries, but I hardly think it was propaganda from my perspective at least.
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The closest thing to "propaganda" I can think of was the Civil War saga frankly. Abraham Lincoln is considered an extreme hero up here in the North, who prevented our country from falling apart. Later in college, I learned that Southerners have a different perspective... even today. Extremely interesting to me.
Also, a friend of mine from Hawaii told me the Hawaiian perspective on the Annexation of Hawaii. Apparently... there is a bit of controversy on that subject in Hawaii that wasn't taught to me.
My experience is far more like your parent commenter's than to yours. Very pro-America, all black-and-white, no need to reason about or analyze murky grey areas or anything that is recent enough to possibly offend somebody's parents (eg Vietnam War wasn't covered). None of that was ever mentioned in my schooling. US schools do vary a lot.
This was the case for me. We spent most of our time reading about the civil war in elementary school. Not the policy part either but more about all of the activities of the war and battles. Post that it was mostly "Western Civilization" meaning Antiquity and European and American history.
The only time I really got to study about the rest of the world was in a semester-long class that was optional! My AP History class was the closest thing that delved into the negative aspects of US history. I really didn't start questioning things until I read Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" shortly after graduating college.
Here's what I learned in history class:
* Civil Rights Movement
* Jim Crow Laws
* Trail of Tears
* Vietnam War
* LA Riots / Rodney King
* Great Depression
* Chicago Fire
* WWII Internment Camps / War Propaganda
* Bay of Pigs in Cuba
* Other failed Coups in South America
* Sherman's March to the Sea
* "The Jungle" (disgusting food)
* Child Labor
* Growth of Monopolies
* Haymarket massacre
What the were YOU doing in school? Mine was mostly a public education, so... plenty of "US mistakes" taught throughout US history from my perspective. Plenty of good and bad in history.
Middle School was mostly basic stuff, borderline propaganda from my memory. (But LA Riots were in fact covered in Middle School, perhaps because they were more "current events" rather than "history" at that point in time). But High School was filled with "TRUTH", in depth analysis and so forth. It was quite eye opening from my perspective. My High School US History class didn't cover "modern US History" however, and stopped in the late 50s. "Modern US History" was an elective at my high school... so my knowledge past the 50s becomes a bit incomplete.
The school cop even ensured a visit to many classes, to describe the rights of citizens in the state. Along the lines of: "In this state, you have the right to know a Cop's identity. If he refuses, take down the number on his car. Here's the police number where you can complain about this stuff". Very specific advice on how to cooperate, and if necessary, complain, about cops.
I know this was unusual and probably specific to the school cop who was assigned to my school. He was African American "and proud of it", to describe his attitude. (may have contributed to his emphasis on teaching citizens rights).
I don't think your logic is sound. It's a tautology to say that this is the America Americans want because this is the America that Americans have, and to say that in a democracy that this is the America that Americans desire because, well, here we are is just as much of a post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc.
Part of the reason we find ourselves here is because the government has lied and kept what it isn't lying about in secrecy. A fundamental aspect of the Declaration of Independence is "...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." You cannot assume consent regarding government powers that have been built upon secrecy and lies. Likewise, complacency is not consent.
One of the most insidious and pernicious lies has been the implication that perfect safety is not only possible, but desirable. Note that this lie is being told by omission: US citizens are not being told that the government will make them perfectly safe, but that whatever the citizens find out about what is being done is being done for "national security" or to keep "the nation" safe.
The current uproar about government spying on its citizens, not to mention spying outside of "terrorist" suspicions, is evidence that spying programs conflict with the implication that safety is what is being provided by these programs.
A lot of these same Americans are betting on football and in NCAA pools, play poker, drank when they were underage and likely have underage kids who drink now.
So if you want them to wake up, it must be driven home over, and over and over, and over again, that these are the kinds of activities that could result in a SWAT team breaking down their doors, and maybe them or their good friends getting shot.
I think the main obstacle will be an unwillingness to comprehend that things have really gotten this bad.
But when do we stop to ask why we are living in this constant state of hyper-fear? When do we start asking whether the scale of our "security-state" is asymmetrical to the actual threats? When do we ask how much Terror is still left in the War on Terror?
IMO, it really started in earnest on 9/11. It's like people are in this strange state of psychological terror without realizing it. I swear, we've never recovered on the whole and it feels like something on the PTSD "spectrum".
Of course this fear has been fanned and used to justify an egregious power grab, costly wars, and untold billions in profits for the security-military-industrial complex, and so much more. See The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
Is it a coincidence that fear is so very profitable or that people are willing to give up their freedom to quell it?
No, of course it's not the America we want. It's the America we get though due to our longstanding apathy and inability to curb special interest groups and corporate control of politics. I think things will change though. Things have been pretty nice in the US for a while. We're now seeing the dark side of apathy and people are starting to care again (in my opinion). It had been pretty easy to shrug off politics as corrupt and not care when we still had relative normalcy. But a lot of Americans have awoken in recent weeks to find themselves living in a sci-fi dystopia that we were warned about in the classics of literature, the kind that had always been eerily similar to our lives but never quite reached. We're now in full on 1984 and Americans won't accept that, I guarantee it (we're the country that ended slavery and celebrate our roots as rebels: we shall overcome).
- Internet regulation justified by copyright protection
- Continued unconstitutional wars again "terrorism"
- Continued imperialism
- Whistleblower vilification
- Implicit taxation through unbridled govt debt
On Facebook, some friends are even afraid to "like" these stories now.
Most friends just ignore my posts. I can't tell whether they're apathetic, or whether they're suppressing it in fear. Or whether Facebook is throttling my posts using their "spam" algorithm. Maybe I've been throttled by my friends.
Most friends on Facebook post about how ugly or pretty something is, about the food they consume, or they're pushing some agenda of their own, as everybody has them nowadays.
Then you start wondering whether you're just being paranoid. Of course in normal pre-media life, such an inconsistent state of existence would be impossible. Can you imagine everybody around you being happy with ice-cream cones after being abused by yet another "lawful" breach of your liberty by the SWAT team, joined by some "celebrity"?
So it's easy to ignore the signs and live on earning your paycheck. Every day is exactly the same. You can't stay here, keep on moving on.
Dude, how do you even watch sports right now? There's so much work to do.
Yet days go on, everybody is chasing a paycheck or chasing a paper pyramid scheme. Or chasing fame, or chasing tail, anything to help take their minds off the now-ordinary horrid reality.
Some see the problems and can't help but feel that something is wrong, that something is unjust in this world. They're searching for a real purpose, as they stumble with potential solutions that have been tried and have failed.
I understand your sentiment but if there's anything positive to hold onto it's that we're not the cliche frogs in water that slowly comes to a boil. Snowden alerted us in stark terms almost overnight that the water was boiling. We were in 1984 but the reality of our world was classified as top secret. In the tech community many of us saw the water slowly coming to a boil since about 2003. I think to most Americans though all the recent events comes as actual news. Yes, hopefully we can focus on matters of substance and not the mindless drivel we normally occupy ourselves with. Humanity, though, has always been the same I think. It's a case of "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing". I really don't think anyone is the US gov't has malice or ill will or a truly evil side. It's inertia and apathy that have led us to our current state. And so I think that if we decide to change course, we will.
> I really don't think anyone is the US gov't has malice or ill will or a truly evil side.
Of course it depends on what you call "truly evil", but I believe that in any sufficiently large government (not just US) exist a significant number of sociopaths. It's just that, sociopaths exist, smart sociopaths also exist, and those are qualities that make it easy to find their way into politics. (and on an even more cynical note, a combination of qualities of particularly evil + intelligent + sociopathic, sounds like an even more likely profile to find itself in a position of power)
It's the America you paid for. Three trillion dollars on a decade of war does not just vanish, it does not stay abroad. Demobbed soldiers, private training and supply companies, attitudes and expectations - they have to go somewhere, do something, affect someone.
True. Fallujah, being an example of SWAT team over-reaction
On a nationstate level.
the more direct problem that there is no a preponderance of
ex-soldiers, weapons, and an entire industrial base massively expanded and looking for civilian roles now everyone can see wars winding down and this kind of thing
will be more prevalent.
All the forces mentioned in the article (including "militarisation" are conspiring in a self-reinforcing system)
It's hard to see how to move away ("what you think our boys in blue should not have body armour? APCs?")
>True. Fallujah, being an example of SWAT team over-reaction On a nationstate level.
That's so daft I don't know where to start. There's no such thing as an overreaction in war.
>the more direct problem that there is no a preponderance of ex-soldiers, weapons, and an entire industrial base massively expanded and looking for civilian roles now everyone can see wars winding down and this kind of thing will be more prevalent.
All these things were true to a much greater extent at the end of the Vietnam war and again at the end of the cold war.
There is when we (a) don't know who the enemies are and (b) live in a post-Geneva world where the international consensus is that yes, there are lines that can never be crossed.
Of course it isn't the America that America wants. But the problem is that most people are not aware of the connections between the incentives and the policies and actions those incentives produce. Indeed, most folks, harbor some bit of political ideology which is in some way counter-factual and they refuse to acknowledge that being the case. That applies to EVERYONE of EVERY political party. Period. What's worse is that now our public political discourse is so tainted and poisonous that it is nigh impossible to actually have a frank and honest discussion about any matter of public policy. It's almost all just games and shouting instead.
There is hope, but it's going to take more hard work than most people believe to make things significantly better.
It's not the America I grew up in, nor the one I want to live in. So I left and have no plans to go back anytime soon. The land of the free isn't so free anymore, which makes me incredibly sad. And my parents live in VA!
well, the America has definitely changed during last decade+. Yet, still it is somewhat surprising that there is a place you found you think is more free.
I now live very happily in Australia. It's not perfect by any means (nanny state comes to mind), but I feel safer here. More importantly, my wife feels safer.
The issue was never one of safety, the odds were never high that you would be on the receiving end of one of these SWAT attacks. The issue is the rights of citizens and their protection from unwarranted searches and unreasonable uses of force.
Australia has it's own issues on that front, look up Labor's recent proposal of data retention for electronic records or the infamous great firewall of Australia.
And as far as government's with regulatory zeal go, you've hit the motherload.
It's a lovely country (I've spent the last three years in Sydney and really and truly loved it) but don't kid yourself about the level of government intrusion in every. last. bloody. thing. It's maddening.
The safety issue is not about the government but the level of violence in general society, schools, etc. IMHO, Australia as a whole is a safer place to live than the US right now. You don't hear about people shooting up schools, etc in Australia because it doesn't happen. It feels to me that the rate of this type of incident in the US is increasing.
As I said, Australia isn't perfect by far. But at least the government isn't ignoring its core, founding principles like the US government has been doing the last couple decades.
I did mention nanny state in my original comment. To each their own. :)
So for now, in the Fourth Circuit, sending a SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Oh, it goes much, much farther than that.
The US Supreme Court has ruled (see Raich) that the federal government is justified in sending an armed raid into a terminally ill old lady's home because she allegedly was growing six marijuana plants under her doctor's supervision & approval for her sole personal use in accordance with state law. The "justified" rationale? Her home-grown state-legal personal-use herbs decreased demand in illegal inter-state commerce, therefor affected inter-state commerce, therefor was subject to federal regulation. I kid you not.
(Consequential tangent: if the court had not ruled that way, a pending related case (Stewart) would have permitted felons to home-build their own machine-guns. The court was faced with bizarre rulings whichever way they went with Raich.)
> if the court had not ruled that way, a pending related case (Stewart) would have permitted felons to home-build their own machine-guns
This is false. The related case would have left machine-gun building a matter of State law. Pure-Federalism is not the only possible form of governance, and it's not the US Constitution's approved form.
Not false. There is currently a federal prohibition on anyone making machineguns at all (military contracts of course exempted); if Raich had been ruled to the contrary, it would have applied to Stewart in such a way as to remove machinegun construction from the federal prohibition IF the item in question remained entirely in-state, consequence going so far as to restrict the federal government from prohibiting felons from making them (as Mr. Stewart was, in fact, a felon convicted of making a novel home-brew machinegun). Thus, the federal government would have permitted felons to home-build their own machineguns.
We were talking about federal laws and courts. I assume that in a short blog post I'm not expected to address the proliferation of overlapping jursidictional priorities and conflicts. But since you insist on taking the discussion where it wasn't going...
Fact is, majority of US states do permit machinegun ownership, so long as it complies with federal law; thus if federal law permits felons building machineguns (so long as it remains in-state), majority of states would not prohibit it. Now that the discussion has clarified that the remaining prohibitions would occur in a minority of more than four dozen states, and that the federal government would have at least had no say in the matter (as opposed to compulsive legalization in all encompassed jurisdictions), and that the discussion had not been addressing state laws (or if it did, it was that the applicable state ALLOWED the activity), that for most practical purposes the one-sentence summary of the horribly verbose & convoluted verdict in question and its consequences was sufficiently accurate?
(Pardon me. I'm getting increasingly irritated by exchanges that amount to: "X." "X? You're WRONG because you didn't address minor tangential issues Y, Z, P, D, and Q in comprehensive detail, all of which had little to do with the discussion at hand.")
It could be a good story but after 3 pop up ads which were almost impossible to close on this device I gave up. What was the story, anyways? The first two paragraphs sounded interesting. I just couldn't get to the rest of the story to read it.
The article's photo is from the 2012 RNC in Tampa, FL. Despite an army of police with all the equipment a paramilitary outfit could wish for, there were almost no arrests. In total for the week there were 2, far fewer than there would have been in a normal week.
A year later and they're still riding around in their RNC purchased bicycles, cruising in RNC speed boats and zipping around in RNC bobcats. The high-tech CCTV system is also still in use (and has yet to actually solve a single crime). It's bizarre.
Similar situation here. I spoke up at the city council meeting about keeping the cameras and the Mayor used some budgetary magic to make it something the council couldn't rule on (they bought the cameras with RNC money and built in a maintenance contract--the council could only get rid of them if it were a financial decision). Once you give a police force a new toy you will never be able to take it back.
Just a side note: certain countries in Europe have much more military style uniformed police force, including police living in barracks. None of them have the track record of armed violence the police in the US have.
I'm just saying, the militarization is at most a symptom (one of many), not the root cause for the US "war against the people".
Are you sure? Another possibility is that you're just not hearing about it, if they're disproportionately targeting groups that you aren't a member of.
The U.S. is a weird case, because there are these very clear abuses, and yet there's a culture of uncovering these abuses even when they're not happening to one's own group.
After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting.
All the more reason to never speak to the police. Ever. What happened to 'protect AND serve'? The police have made their jobs harder by systematically turning every citizen into a criminal and forcing every person to not trust them. If I were ever to witness a crime I would hesitate to contact the police at this point out of fear that I would somehow be blamed/included/railroaded/etc... I starting to see how in other police states throughout history the citizens did and said nothing.
No, I think the logic is straightforward: If talking to "anyone, ever" can become a fatal problem involving the police, that makes talking to the police directly an even worse option. "You shouldn't talk to anybody, especially not the police."
While I don't think the conclusion ("don't talk to the police") is necessarily wrong, I don't think the logic is valid at all, much less "straightforward".
Is this actually the case? Of course he didn't know the reason this cop was his "friend" and the cop didn't introduce himself as a cop, but after a few months you would think that his job would have come up once or twice. Did the cop lie when asked about it?
Regardless, it is more than enough reason to never be "friends" with a cop.
The article implies the cop was undercover. Look at it this way: If you knew your buddy was a cop, would you break the law in front of him and put him in an awkward position?
I'm sure the cop's job did come up. And I'm sure he lied. Who would bother to check?
If I were more trusting of police, I suspect I would not think twice about some minor sports gambling with them. That is not the sort of thing that most people think twice about.
I live in a town where they decided to crack down on the minor home poker games. One of the players in town as a cop. Everyone at the games knew him to be a cop because he liked bragging about his drug busts. He played poker with the same group of people for months. One day he showed up to the game with SWAT and news cameras and led everyone out on the 11pm news. So yeah, when it's something as minor as $20 home poker games people don't think that's something cops really care about.
From the description of one of such "botched raids":
"With an accidental weapon discharge, police fatally shot the 68-year-old retiree, who was not the target of the warrant. Police instructed Mr. Stamps to lie on the floor, and Mr. Stamps complied. One officer moved towards Mr. Stamps to check for weapons. The officer's tactical equipment made his movement awkward, and he lost his balance and fell. As he did so, his weapon discharged. Mr. Stamps died from the single bullet wound to his upper chest."
Yes. Sort of like a dialogue from a random comic strip I heard about long ago:
- Why did you shoot the suspect?
- My finger twitched.
- Eight times?
On the more serious note, I still can't imagine that report in any other way that the person was either accidentally shot or executed. I mean, what kind of tripping you'd have to do to shoot a person on the ground in the chest? Geometry doesn't add up.
Police forces seem to be totally exempt from, say, the ban on assault weapons or such in some of the States. Possibly a law that limits the weaponry that police forces can carry along with a reduction in civilian-owned guns might help curb some of these incidents involving trigger-happy cops.
Wow that was some article. If these kind of things happened in my country, I would get the fuck out of my country.
Actually, I didn't like the way the UK was going, so when the opportunity came about, I moved.
Thanks to the new immigration bill, the whole border with Mexico will become militarized, and will employ more people than the whole FBI, and will be under DHS. This is what the "war on terror" post-9/11 culture has created.
Was he reading Dreaming in Code? For everyone unfamiliar with this book, the co-founder of Salon.com, Scott Rosenberg, wrote a book called "Dreaming in Code" that's basically about why writing software is so hard.
427 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 511 ms ] threadhttp://www.restorethefourth.net/ comes to mind.
Even then, hammers have uses. People like this don't.
Native American Indians have a philosophy that our actions should be guided by what is best for future generations. Being apathetic and sleep-walking into a less free future society, and screwing up the environment are selfish acts.
Otherwise I totally agree with your post.
Front and center is the sentence correcting some slight, inconsequential anachronism that has nothing to do with the overall point of the comment and only serves to show the perceived intelligence of helpfulness of the commenter. Then there is a short sentence, more of an afterthought, addressing the point of the comment.
You can't break out deep thinking from the surface layer aspie absent-social-mindedness. Just smile, accept them for what they are without pitying them, and keep making the world a better place together.
http://www.aimovement.org/
I get that police work is often dangerous but individuals that have shown poor judgement are retained on the force. That police officer that shot the dog 4 times had already shot and killed a developmentally disabled guy who was brandishing a knife but could have been tazed or bean-bagged.
These are not the sorts of people to be handing out guns to.
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffengebrauch_der_Polizei_in_D...
Situations where firearms were discharged
36 - Adversarial Conflict
36 - Animal Attack
15 - Unintentional Discharge
02 - Unauthorized Use
03 - Suicide Attempt
---
124 - Total officers firing
416 - Total shots fired
003 - Total officers shot and injured by subject
001 - Total officers shot and killed by subject
019 - Total subjects shot and injured by officer
009 - Total subjects shot and killed by officer
http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan...
I'd expect better from Hacker News.
For what it's worth, Wikipedia has a complete list of people killed by US Police Officers and the police reports from them. In 2012, there were 587 people killed by police [1]. This is much, much larger than in Germany, even accounting for population difference.
I would argue that more relevant than pure population is differences in homicide rate. By the data you've given, approximately 1-2% of all homicides in Germany are by police officers (6-12 officer killings, 690 homicides in germany [2]). It's worth noting that in the USA, approximately 3% of all killings were by police officers (547/14748[2]) which seems in line with what my understanding would be -- it's worse in the USA but not ridiculously disproportionate.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforce...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
http://hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/29-black-p...
Here's one take, which is focused on black folks shot and killed over the past year. Note how many were armed.
When TV news and viral videos and newspapers make us feel like terrorism or kidnapping is more prevalent than it actually is, we call it sensationalism. Why is this any different? Is it because it confirms things you already believe to be true?
I looked at the list you provided, and tried to correlate it against the Wikipedia list. Many of the dates etc don't match up but I tried. A number of the cases where the suspect is listed as "unarmed" don't jive with the police reports, at the very least. Others involve things that are clearly assault even if there was no gun (like assaulting someone with a car).
That said, I do think in particular if you are a black male you are likely to be mistreated by police. That's not justifiable. But I still don't see real evidence that this is an epidemic or particularly pervasive.
I have friends who are police officers so it's not like I hate cops. I do hate the fact they close ranks and protect the bad ones though.
I personally know a guy who was put into a private jail on trumped up charges and denied bail. He fought in court, won, and has been presented with a large bill from the private jail. The kicker? The DA, the sheriff and many in the police force are investors in the private jail!
Can you say "conflict of interest"?
That said, I assume you'd agree that anecdotes don't constitute data, and that we shouldn't develop strong beliefs on the backs of them. To assume the prevalence of something on the basis of loud anecdotes leads us to being easily manipulated -- in the absence of data I believe should keep our priors weak and seek better data.
In a small group this is a pretty good strategy. Where it breaks down in life is that the odds that we hear about an anecdote depend on the anecdote. This leads to all kinds of bias.
I know the limits of my conscious analysis. I therefore have come to accept that there is value for me in filtering out "something that happened to someone I directly know" from "something I heard about". Since this happened to someone I directly know, it affects what I think.
YMMV, and if you follow my rule, definitely should. But you'll at least understand why I might come to different conclusions than you do.
I tend to agree that we infer theory from anecdotes not data and even that that is a good thing. But don't we have a responsibility after developing a theory to evaluate it before making claims about it?
Epistemology is about how we know what we think we know. This is very separate from rhetoric, the art of trying to convince others with your words.
I personally focus on epistemology, which includes clarifying what I believe, why I believe it, how strongly I believe it, and what different things I could reasonably believe in different circumstances. Knowing these things often leads me to conclude, "I believe X, you seem to believe Y, there is no way that I am going to change your beliefs." This seems to me to be a feature, not a flaw.
I am unable to be friends with strongly religious types who are unable to muster the same feature.
I tend to agree that we infer theory from anecdotes not data and even that that is a good thing. But don't we have a responsibility after developing a theory to evaluate it before making claims about it?
In my world view, yes.
If you see me failing to properly qualify what I claim, then please call me on it.
That said, when I make a claim, I'm almost never going to give my full supportive reasoning for my world view. Life is too short.
One wonders at what point you would consider it 'ridiculously disproportionate'? 10%? 20%?
It gets worse. The person being arrested already had a lawsuit filed for police brutality. According to his lawyer on NBP, he recognized the police officer who killed his dog - that was one of the officers who had been part of giving him the beating that his lawsuit was about.
Let's just say there is a history there.
The developmentally disabled guy was black.
Of the people raided by SWAT teams in the article, the ones who did not go to court (regardless of whether or not they won excessive force settlements) and had a violent or lethal encounter were all black or in that one case, hispanic.
Police officers aren't punished because the victims of police brutality are overwhelmingly nonwhite. It's not that the victims are poor, or of mysterious sexual orientation. It's really because they are black and hispanic.
To get a good grip on how segregated U.S. cities are, here is the Census rankings of "dissimilarity," or measure of how unmixed the population is geographically[2], of every metro area.[1] The lowest of all metro areas is 32%, which suggests that about 1/3 of black people would have to move to white parts of town to achieve balance.
Routine brutality against blacks, as opposed to routine brutality against protesters (an equally heinous but different problem), is ignored because the victims don't live next to us.
[0] http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=police+shoot+dog [1] http://www.censusscope.org/us/rank_dissimilarity_white_black... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_dissimilarity
Police, searching (in the wrong town) for a man wanted for an expired vehicle registration, shoot family dog while searching in a gated back yard for their suspect.
http://www.wfaa.com/news/texas-news/212185641.html
>Leander Police say the officer never noticed the child, and it’s policy to use lethal force on any animal they think is attacking.
Fortunately, they missed the child.
These hyped-up (sometimes roided-up) SWAT teams do what they do to justify their existence....no manager wants to preside over a shrinking department. It takes a lot of thinking and long-term policy making to reduce this perverse yet basic economic incentive
1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/police-militarizati...
2) http://www.startribune.com/local/209811381.html
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/forfeiture
EDIT
This link is from 2008, but it seems to state that local governments get about $1 Billion/year also...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9149048...
"Yes we scan"
I'm not saying that firearms need to be outlawed for anyone but government agencies. I'm just arguing that when people need to be arrested (lawfully or otherwise), police officers want also want to protect themselves in their line of work, so they necessarily need to create an imbalance of power for their own self-preservation. The victim was unarmed, so the use of SWAT teams certainly was unnecessary and he could have been arrested by two officers and a single patrol car, but given any other case, he might have carried a weapon and gunned down an officer.
Indeed, that’s exactly what happened to seventy-two-year-old Aaron Awtry in 2010. Awtry was hosting a poker tournament in his Greenville, South Carolina, home when police began breaking down the door with a battering ram. Awtry had begun carrying a gun after being robbed. Thinking he was about to be robbed again, he fired through the door, wounding Deputy Matthew May in both arms. The other officers opened fire into the building. Miraculously, only Awtry was hit. As he fell back into a hallway, other players reporting him asking, “Why didn’t you tell me it was the cops?” The raid team claimed they knocked and announced several times before putting ram to door, but other players said they heard no knock or announcement. When Awtry recovered, he was charged with attempted murder. As part of an agreement, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. Police had broken up Awtry’s games in the past. But on those occasions, they had knocked and waited, he had let them in peacefully, and he’d been given a $100 fine.
Summary: people who are committing minor crimes don't want to trade up to major crimes. Be reasonable and most people will be reasonable in return. The police increase the risk to themselves and to the citizens they are supposed to be protected by using unreasonable force.
Yeah, that appears to be a pretty foolish thing to do. What if it were firefighters who noticed a fire through his upstairs window? I don't think that they would just ring the bell and wait for an answer. I know that this a hypothetical situation, but it just seems a really stupid thing to just blindly fire at whatever is behind the door.
The only people who claim that the police did not first knock on the door are the friends and associates of the victim. One of the two groups is lying, and both can be lying to cover their asses. I have too little information to know whether this is an actual case of police brutality, sorry.
Edit: As a correction, the victim and his friends don't need to be lying. Perhaps the doorbell was broken, perhaps they didn't hear the police officers pounding at their door. I don't know, why should I jump to conclusions?
>Yeah, that appears to be a pretty foolish thing to do.
Definitely. Reminded me of the part in Major Payne when the little boy is scared because he thinks there's a monster in his closet. The first time I saw this, I figured it was one of the other boys in the movie playing a prank on him and hiding in the closet. Major Payne draws his pistol and unloads it into the closet door, exclaiming "if he's still in there, he ain't happy." At this point, I was like OMG he probably killed a kid (there's no one actually in the closet). Point being, if you fire a gun through a door knowing someone is on the other side, you should be held as accountable had you aimed the gun directly at them and fired.
Well, to be fair, the only people at the scene that weren't police officers were his friends and associates. He was hosting a private gathering in his residence after all.
When I hear about cops shooting dogs when they get the address wrong on a warrant, I worry. But in this case, well, don't go bear baiting.
What the article posits is that what has changed is not, in fact, the level of danger that police face, but that there has been a combination of mission creep and cops getting away with pushing the boundaries of excessive force. Other commenters have pointed out that there is a monetary aspect as well: departments justify bigger budgets by using personnel and equipment on more and more trivial tasks. What used to be routine enforcement and arrests become full SWAT takedowns.
[1] http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/03/chart-day-gun-...
Seems that all that DHS money spread all over the country has put local police into the mindset of pork barrel spending and big government largesse.
If this keeps up and/or accelerates, it's only a matter of time before someone acting in the same spirit as defense distributed throws an arduino controlled turret and either sells them on silk road, or open sources the plans and we're living in a much shittier world because of the out of control arms race accepting that the police are going to act like militant home invading thugs will provoke.
Then it's a good thing that most states have laws that prohibit owning fully-automatic firearms then.
> You can't just stop at the perceived consequences of your supposed equilibrium point, you have to follow it all the way to the logical conclusion.
Don't be absurd. If I use a semi or fully automatic weapon to protect myself against police brutality, it will only ensure that I won't get out alive.
Nice slippery-slope argument by the way, do you work at FOX News?
I assume though since you're automatically painting opposition you don't understand with the same tired old bullshit labels typical of mainstream statist standard leftists, correcting your mistakes is liable to just annoy you with more cognitive dissonance. My apologies, I won't be replying again.
I only attempt argue that, 1) given the fact that people are free to own lethal firearms within their own homes, 2) given the fact that police officers are wont to die if they get shot, 3) and given the assertion that presented with a police force, SWAT or otherwise, within the safety of their own home, threatening the suspect with arrest, the suspect can resort to irrational and sometimes violent behavior, I conclude that to maximize their self-preservation, police forces have to ensure an imbalance of power while making the arrest.
You are calling this argument spectacularly stupid, so you are going to, without having to resort to logical fallacies, show to me why my conclusion is wrong.
> I assume though since you're automatically painting opposition you don't understand with the same tired old bullshit labels typical of mainstream statist standard leftists, correcting your mistakes is liable to just annoy you with more cognitive dissonance.
That you are quick to associate me with a political position that I am not inclined to support merely betrays your confused dichotomous outlook on politics. I can't even begin to guess what a "mainstream statist standard leftist" is. I only asked the question because to my knowledge, FOX News often uses the slippery slope argument as a rhetorical device. You turn it into a political debate.
> My apologies, I won't be replying again.
Right.
http://projectsentrygun.rudolphlabs.com/ http://realsentrygun.com/ http://paintballsentry.com/Videos.htm
also, with OpenCV, cheap hobby servos, webcams and 35$ Raspis, and 40$ AKs, the parts are pretty easy to come by.
You are making a huge leap from the presence of weapons to the use of violence against other people.
I think I agree.
> You are making a huge leap from the presence of weapons to the use of violence against other people.
I think police officers has to put their lives on the line. I'm not saying that SWAT teams have to use violence, I'm only saying that police officers should come prepared with semi-automatic firearms and body armor if there is a suspicion that the suspect will be armed.
Part of protecting people that do not have a history of violence is giving them the benefit of the doubt. Sure, there need to be lines drawn that allow the police to protect themselves, but anyone choosing to be a cop is going to be aware of the fact that they will occasionally be placed in dangerous situations.
Without the SWAT team, this remains calm and less costly for the police and the taxpayer.
Edit: Fixed some terrible grammar.
No. The guy was an optometrist with a local business, your suggestion that he was some undercover cop-murderer waiting for the slightest provocation is absurd and insulting. He had every incentive to maintain civility in his neighborhood/town. There is very little reason to believe that he would have reacted violently to any of the following alternative tactics:
- A phone call from an investigator requesting a meeting.
- A knock on the door from a pair of polite/professional investigators.
- Police could have waited for him to leave in a car and had patrolmen stop him on the street.
>I'm just arguing that when people need to be arrested (lawfully or otherwise)
How can you defend SWAT as a valid way to make an unlawful arrest? Have I misunderstood you?
SWAT is only appropriate for hostage and other situations where danger is imminent. In other cases of people "needing arrest", the use of SWAT is abusive.
Hindsight is 20/20. I will probably agree with you that if the police force did proper research on the suspect, then they would have chosen a different approach. However, I don't understand why they didn't so I can say very little about it. Perhaps it requires a structural change within the police force to accomplish this.
> How can you defend SWAT as a valid way to make an unlawful arrest? Have I misunderstood you?
You misunderstand me. Unlawful arrests are not good, but they happen anyway. The fact that the arrest is unlawful is not always known to the officers performing the arrest, so at that point in time and space, the legality of the arrest has become irrelevant.
This wasn't some spur-of-the-moment action. The investigators planned this operation, one of them had befriended Culosi. They don't get to use the "hindsight" defense here. I would argue that the investigator entrapped the Culosi by upping the ante to the point that made it a felony charge.
Here's one case, but there are many: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/26/taliban-sympathi...
Pay attention to the details next time you read about a foiled terror plot in the US. A couple of them seem to have been legit but most follow the pattern.
[Edit] I became curious about what happened to this guy so I Googled him and found this: http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2013/04/26/alleged-taliban-sy... looks like they threw the book at him and sent him to prison for 8 years for having fired a gun at a firing range. [/Edit]
The shooting is another issue. The cop is saying it wasn't deliberate, and that's probably true.
It seems to me that he would never have bet anywhere near that much without several months of persuasion by the police.
Therefore, if it weren't for the cop pressuring him it is very unlikely he would have ever broken that particular law.
Granted it's a moot point, because as you say entrapment is a legal defense and the would-be defendant is dead.
"Most of us carry video cameras in our pockets now. Filming police needs to become ubiquitous. There should be no police officer in the United States that doesn't know that at any time they could be being filmed and held accountable for their actions by the public they are paid to protect and serve. It is one case where I think constant citizen surveillance could be useful. After a few years of it and constant court rulings that it is protected, perhaps cops would stop yelling at people and arresting them for doing nothing wrong. Yes, I'm talking to everyone on this site. If you are walking back from grabbing a burrito and see the cops "talking to" a homeless person on the street, or pulling over a driver for running a red light or detaining someone, /you/ need to stop for 5-10 minutes, get out your camera phone, and start filming. Please. For the love of a police state run amuck."
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2008566,00.ht...
By the way, my father recalls from when my country was a dictatorship that "you couldn't take photos of police or military, or you were arrested". Democratic U.S.A. is doing the same..
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glik_v._Cunniffe
2) http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/05/7-rules-for-recording-...
If you do get arrested, you can both win damages for yourself and often change the entire written rules of a police department by suing.
But again, normalizing this will go a long way to people not getting harassed and cops knowing that they could be being filmes in any public interaction at any time.
Basically I am saying the fact that you haven't been arrested does not in any way (logically, evidentially or even anecdotally) suggest that this the case one should prepare for.
1. Don't buy sparkling water if you're a college student
2. Don't bet with friends because an arbitrary threshold of about $2k warrants your execution
3. Don't tell American citizens that their government abuses its power, or you'll be charged with espionage
4. It's probably a bad idea to bear arms these days, because saying "Officer, I have a weapon in the trunk of my car" might give him reason to shoot you in self defense
5. You don't actually have free speech anymore, so be careful about that. If you threaten to shoot up a school, even jokingly and totally within your rights, you will be incarcerated for half a year before your trial. And who knows if the judge will let you off? You just have to pray for one who knows and abides by the constitution.
Point 3 is patently false. All of my Facebook friends, and I, regularly say that the United States government abuses its power, some from the right, some from the left, and many from a general freedom-loving perspective, and we all go on posting as we please. All of these statements are exaggerations. Many of these statements refer to problems that are much worse in other places. (If you think that arbitrary abuse by the police is the worst it can be in the United States, you haven't traveled very much.) Sure, protest fearlessly about any abuse you find anywhere. But don't lose sight of reality.
AFTER EDIT: People who follow my comments on Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tokenadult
will be well aware that I participate in public protests here in the United States, in full view of TV news cameras and police observers. (The last protest I participated in was across the street from the headquarters of the Minneapolis police department.) I am an equal-opportunity democracy movement activist, desiring more power for the people in every country of the world. As one of the grandchild comments to this comment has now said, it's silly to exaggerate conditions in the United States, as that just robs a comment of credibility. If you want to establish a better trend line for United States policy, be specific in your policy proposals, and make your policy proposals public fearlessly, early and often. Don't be an anonymous coward. Put your name behind your convictions.
People power democracy movements that nudge countries from dictatorship to democracy can really work. I have seen it done. A successful movement for greater freedom requires great courage, and a degree of social trust among the movement participants that is not easy to find. Allow me to repeat advice I have shared here on Hacker News before. If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the free, downloadable publications of the Albert Einstein Institution,
http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html
remembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from. You can find publications in more than a dozen languages there to share with your friends around the world.
And yeah, your point that the govt won't abuse the shit out of its power if you are a whistleblower makes me wonder if you've been living under a rock recently. I imagine you don't think it was any big deal that the US coerced other countries into not allowing the Bolivian President use their airspace because the US was upset with Bolivia offering Snowden asylum? But yeah, you're right man, no abuses whatsoever will occur if you are a whistleblower...
The type of self awareness one would have to lack to get to the point where they are making the point you just made is staggering.
By point 3 he meant actions by USG whistle blowers with access to classified information, not a civilian's facebook account.
If you want reality to change, you have to accept reality. Skewing it to the most sensationalistic interpretation only makes it easier to dismiss.
I mean, if you set the bar as low as "better than living in a dictatorship" instead of "comparable to western democracy -foo-", you're engaging in some pretty solid resetting of the frame of reference.
However, in this case, there is no clarification needed. Compare the United States across whatever subjective experience and online indices you can find (economic freedom, press freedom, happiness, quality of life, etc but take them with a grain of salt) and make up your own mind.
After having traveled a little bit and lived in circumstances very different from my current life in SF, I have become less concerned with the water, guns, bets, and bad jokes and more concerned about the creeping changes in massive institutions like the US government. After all, one of the hallmarks of a democracy is how it protects the minorities from the tyranny of the majority.
Of course not, but they need to semi-accurately reflect the way things are going on a broad scale. If someone steps on my toe at the convenience store and doesn't apologize, I don't start a rally cry about how America is full of toe-hating assholes. If it starts happening systemically then I might be more willing to make that charge.
and Steven Seagal driving a tank into that guys living room for fighting chickens...wow.
7. Become a cop. A proper one, not just a security guard or something.
I wonder how applicable 7 is if you're an immigrant. You might get charged with espionage or something.
What I can say is that cops seem to get indoctrinated as part of their training about the rule of law and the need to enforce laws "because it's the law" without thought or common sense applied to each situation.
6. Write 'disturbing' material (for any definition of disturbing)
7. Own a permanent marker
8. Connect to an unsecured WiFi
9. Use a fake name on the Internet
The article mentions one case where a judge refused to issue a search warrant for a narcotics investigation and instead the police brought representatives from the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and raided the place with a swat team to conduct an alcohol inspection. What did they find?
Two sample bottles of beer that weren't labeled as samples and a bottle of vodka in the office. The fourth circuit court of appeals upheld the search. According to the article: So for now, in the Fourth Circuit, sending a SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The media is also not helping at all, and making the problem worse, because they are usually on the government's side when it comes to such issues.
It is hard for me to look at, say, Steubenville[1] (to take just the most publicized of several examples that I've seen in the news lately) and understand how anyone can suggest that accused rapists aren't given a presumption of innocence in our society. The blame heaped on rape victims is often tremendous, even when everyone knows that it happened.
(In the Steubenville case, there were widely shared photos documenting what happened to the young woman in question and at least one video of a guy at the same party laughing about what his friends had done to her, and most of the local community evidently still strongly sided with her rapists.)
[1] http://sports.yahoo.com/news/highschool--steubenville-high-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case
If you look at the wider picture of media coverage, quite the opposite. Reddit started the witch trial pretty much instantly, with some of the most upvoted comments being for life in prison or worse.
Look at the backlash when CNN referred to the accused as boys with a formerly promising future whose lives were now ruined. God forbid you show an ounce of sympathy for accused rapists, because it's impossible to be sympathetic to the victim and not want anyone to go through the hell that the rest of their collective life is going to be.
It turned out, however, that each person in the room had either been wrongly accused of a crime or knew someone that had been railroaded by the system. They knew that the prosecution wasn't perfect. My sample size is 6 people, myself included, and we are all fairly educated.
Regarding the media, everyone in the room agreed that the Nancy Graces of the world are actively harming our society...
Granted it's just one anecdote about one jury on one case in North Carolina, but this jury was not prejudiced against the "criminal" from the start. And, if anything, by the end, most of us were biased against the State for being (or appearing to be) some combination of: incompetent (the investigator from the Sheriff's department), abusive / a plain dick ( the prosecutor), and/or dishonest (the cop who had his car broken into).
Her in Norway its can sometime take 10-20 minutes just to get thru to the police if you have an emergency at night. I hope the local SWAT time at least is out chasing real cals and real criminals instead of shutting security guards and raiding the local veterans clubs for some $5 dollar poker fee.
The reality is that crime is falling in the United States and has been for a while (Freakanomics has a decent piece about the relationship of crime and the availability of abortion, with a time lag in the former that showed a correlation with the latter) and I think this paramilitarization is an attempt to fill up budgets and give reasons so that they aren't reduced in the future.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/oakland-sc...
I think this is where efforts to fight these problems fall down. They're almost all based on the assumption that the populace doesn't want this stuff to happen, but that the government pushes it through by abusing power, subverting democracy, etc.
But from what I see, this is not the case. Most Americans want this. Whether it's gun-wielding maniacs, drug dealers, or international terrorist masterminds, they feel unsafe, and want the government to help. They like heavily-armed SWAT teams available at a moment's notice. They like the government spying on every communication they can get their hands on. They like x-ray machines and body scanners in airports.
There is a sizable minority where sanity remains, but it is a minority. I think that efforts to fight these problems need to recognize this, and realize that you have to convince the people as your primary action. Fighting the government won't help, because the people will insist that these things be done, as long as the majority feels this way.
No, I don't know how....
Many young people coming out of school seem to have no conception of rights. To them, it's excusable for rights to be violated if they feel enough justified anger. They are unclear on the concept that rights apply to people and situations in ways they may not like.
How can we expect them to suddenly expect freedom, when they've never had it?
I saw this coming when the WTC rubble was still smoking. The government could have potentially worked to calm down the populace, but instead they amplified the fear. We've been paying the price ever since.
For now, focus on your life, and getting yourself in a position to contribute to the movement in the future.
I don't think this is specific to young people, or to the present time. Everyone will be very noble when talking about rights in the abstract, but they quickly throw that away when it's the rights of a specific group they don't like. I was struck by it after the London riots last year, when there were loud calls for looters to be punished beyond what the judicial system normally allows. You can see the same attitude to terrorism.
It has nothing to do with some kind economists' "rational utilization maximization" function and everything to do with basically a "k-nearest neighbours" algorithm on their social graph for assigning beliefs.
And that is precisely why control of the media is so important.
[…] as much as the program offers freedom and continuity, it also comes with a substantial monitoring component. The iPad keeps teachers and parents constantly informed about what children are doing, what they have learned and how they are progressing.
Better technology in education is clearly the future and, in many ways, the way to go. The mind boggles with possibilities. But, but… we need to put much more thought into it than just the implementation of another nifty feature. We also need better laws and regulations that constrain the authority of the, uhm, authorities. And a government we can trust would be nice too.
The way things stand today, this article just scared the bejesus out of me.
_______________________________________
[1] M. Evers. Radical reform: Dutch iPad schools seek to transform education. Der Spiegel, Jun 28 2013. (http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/new-ipad-schools-...)
I don't presume to know why most people are not particularly vocal on these matters, but it's certainly not because they lack critical thought.
That doesn't make them sub-human. There is no real incentive to care a lot about politics or do all the research and thinking necessary to come to correct conclusions. It's not like your vote is going to change the outcome of the election.
But no it's not terribly self-aggrandizing to assume that most people don't have a lot of interest or education in politics. It's true.
That was the case at other times and places too. And their solution to that, was to shame citizens that only cared for what's economically beneficial.
The solution is to make active participation in politics (= active citizenship) a virtue that people want to be identified with in the same way being "in fashion", "in shape" or "rich" is one.
Of course we have the contrary. Active participation is actually discouraged -- except if you are a career politician.
Job One should really be to solve the problem that the most popular news network is also the most factually inaccurate.
Did you maybe mean George Zimmerman? That would be a more topical example of media stupidity.
One of the strongest times I've ever been sympathetic to the "people are peasants" viewpoints was during my college years in Alabama. During that time Alabama finally voted on removing anti-miscegenation laws from its books. 3/4 of whites voted to keep them (the removal passing due only to a few whites like myself and the large voting block of blacks). The people were particularly vocal and they lacked critical thought.
If it's "ugly and self-aggrandizing" to assume that, for example, my post-doc advisor's parents should have been allowed to marry (and by extension him to exist) then I hope my ugliness runs straight to the bone and my arrogance knows no end.
Here when you attempt to talk about politics, a common reply is: "Dude, I don't care, and I like it that way, don't come with that politics bullshit toward me."
This applies even during the elections...
In fact, here vote is mandatory, because when it wasn't, less than 5% voted at all, but making vote mandatory only made the thing poisonous, people vote because they must, usually on whoever they see most on TV, or some random candidate or another, if you ask a random brazillian who he voted for as representative, most of them don't remember at all, not even the party they voted for.
Also we have plenty of proof, that all elections since electronics ballot were introduced here, were cheated, and people DON'T CARE. I show videos of people hacking our machines and showing how they can steer election to whatever way they want, and most people react with complete apathy, they feel that politics is irrelevant, that all politicians are the same, thus it does not matter if whoever wins won cheating or not, because the result is not important to them.
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"
"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."
Ford shrugged again.
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."
But voting being mandatory, is a very alarming thing. Does not sound like democracy at all. What happens, when one does not vote?
If you stay non-voter, you cannot get hired by government, cannot ask loans from government owned banks (or from the government itself), cannot get issued a new passport, cannot get issued a new id, cannot vote, cannot study in government schools and universities, your companies cannot provide services to the government, and you are considered a draft dodger (ie: for example if you want to join a private school that requires you to have completed military service, the school would be breaking its own rules if it allow you to study there)
If you do that in three elections in a row (here we have elections every two years, thus this is 6 years) your document related to voting is revoked. (meaning that you become de facto stateless, although de jure you are still brazillian).
"government" here apply to all levels (example: the part where you cannot join government schools, apply to federal, state and city schools)
Also this applies to overseas citizens (you must to the embassy and vote there).
You can "justify" your vote, this is showing up into any random voting zone (not necessarily the one where you are registered) and explaining why you won't vote, but usually the only explanation accepted is that you are away from your zone (ie: if you are into a city where you are not registered as resident).
2001, 2005, and 2010 UK elections had less than 70% turn out. That's a scary 30% to 35% of people forced to tick a box.
I'm not sure having that many people randomly ticking a box is good for democracy, especially because it's probably not a random choice but determined things like position on the ballot paper.
It's a strange groupthink that makes anything our government does the de facto morally superior action. It's an inherent trust by the masses that turn questioners into conspiracy theorists. The irony, of course, is that mentaility among the populace is perhaps the single most destructive threat to a true democracy, which demands vigilance.
And all of this is propped up by a corporate-political state that controls a media, which works tirelessly to maintain the image while also distracting us to no end with trivialities.
I don't see any reason to believe this is true. The problem is most people don't have any contact with the police, and they're using a mental model that's about fifteen years out of date. They don't know what's happening out there. It's hard to imagine, but most normal people still get their news from television.
I hear all the time..."It's for the better. It allows the government to keep track of the bad guys and if I have to be inconvenienced a few times out of the year that I travel than so be it."
Or..."All I use email for is work and talking with family. If they want to read that stuff they can, I have nothing to hide. If it helps keep me safe then I'm comfortable."
And the there's..."God forbid we have another 9/11 because too many people are worried about what the government does. There are somethings the government has to do in secrete, there are things they have to lie to us about in order to keep us safe."
I'm 23 years old and I can't tell you where this mentality came from. I know when I was growing up my father showed me how to grow my own food, hunt, use a gun in a respectful mannor and always doubt the government. He told me that violence never solved any of his problems and it's doubtful it'd solve any of mine. He said in order for anyone to be safe they must have their freedom. The freedom to do whatever it is they seek to do. The government is only there to remove that freedom. They want to stifle your ambitions and control how you live.
I know I'm not alone but I'm afraid we are outnumbered.
People comprising the government are not "just" people.
They may have personality traits that compel them to seek out high-power positions.
They may suppress their natural good intentions because where they work, "things are done that way and everybody does that". After several years of such cognitive dissonance, they may just completely change personality-wise.
&c., &c.
How do you believe that social media and the like are playing into this long standing control of the media? What are the implications for the future (of both society and social media)?
But how many people will actually go out of their way to look for those perspectives? The down side of having a thousand voices speak is that you can easily listen to twenty you agree with, and ignore two hundred opponents. I know I do that a lot of the time.
[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/439668500/liberty-is-ris...
Oh please. Compared to what you find on the Internet, FOX looks like a paragon of bias-free and rational reporting. Look no further than the recent rash of conspiracy theorists on HN.
Few believe that it will happen to them.
Humans are really good at denial, rationalization and ignoring the plight of people they do not directly care about.
It's a damning combination.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
Does anyone else feel that perhaps a lot of what we're seeing is a case of "Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them"? As I look back on all of the history education I received in school (the compulsory part, not college), it occurs to me that it was largely a lot of propaganda. With the exception of black slavery, a brief mention of WWII internment camps for Japanese-Americans, and some ambivalence over the war in Vietnam, there's hardly any mention of anything the United States has done which is bad.
And unfortunately, this is all the history education the average voter has.
Professional historians already found out that slavery here is not a black and white issue, but also found that the republican government made law that schools were to teach anti-monarchy propaganda, even if it meant using half-truths about how slavery worked here.
Here, schools are obliged to teach that who abolished slavery was Princess Isabel, like if she was some sort of heroine and the emperor had nothing to do with it, also all the other anti-slavery laws he passed, are usually dismissed (for example, one of the laws the emperor passed was prohibiting the slavery of children of slaves, schools here dismiss that law by saying that it is so impratical that noone would obey anyway, without even giving proof if people obeyed or not).
Also, several of the things done in the first years of the republic were for example rename streets and parks that had any relation to the monarchy or slavery (even if it had to do with slavery abolition)...
During the school I (and everyone else I asked) was taught that Emperor Pedro I independence was shit because he did not abolished slavery with it, and thus if existed non-free people the country was not free at all and still a pawn of Portugal (as with one thing had to do with the other), and all school books give much emphasis on how slavery was not abolished during the independence... I even saw one book that teach (Wrongly) that during US independence they abolished slavery, as a sort of "proof" of how true republics are inherently better because they get rid of slavery.
Also, NONE of the history books mention slave demograhics, and only teach about plantation slavery (that was really akin to US slavery), I don't found a single school book that mentions other forms of slavery (like voluntary indentured servitude), or urban slavery (that in Brazil was the majority, despite most of the free population living in rural areas), or that only 1% of the slaves were actually chained into the infamous "Senzalas" (plantation slave barracks) that he books teach so much about (all history books explain of all evils of the "Senzalas").
Also, not one single book mention who broughts the slaves here in first place (it was not white people... the brazillian first generation slaves were almost all war prisioners or imprisoned criminals that africans came here to sell... Yes, they came here, many people believe portuguese bought the slaves at Africa, this of course happened, but was not the normal course of action, black slavers came to Brazil in portuguese ships, bringing the slaves they wanted to sell here).
Also most school books here don't talk at all about Pedro II technology achievements for example (even in Campinas where I lived most of my life, people don't know that most of public colleges there were made by decree of Pedro II, neither they know that Campinas was the second city in the world to have a telephone system, that Pedro II in person brought there after visiting Mr. Bell in the US during his vacation).
Anecdote time:
1) I remember reading about what US did to the Native Americans, but I remember it being rather dry reading. It was presented more as a series of facts rather than, "this was an evil thing that we shouldn't do again." "Oh yea, by the way, all of the women and children were slaughtered. Moving on..."
2) We never discussed anything more recent than maybe WW2 in history. The only exception here is that in high school you could choose, Pre- or Post-Civil War US History. I ended up choosing pre-Civil War.
3) One of my history teachers in 7th or 8th grade would add some flavor to the texts. Things like disagreeing with the book's assertions that Ben Franklin modelled the Contintental Congress after Native American political organization. His assertion was that the Native Americans were seen as inferior, so even if there was influence from them, it wasn't conscious, or openly admitted to.
However, I wouldn't consider my public history education to be "largely a lot of propaganda". I did take the advanced (AP) history courses at a public high school in Texas, and I might have just been lucky and great teachers, but my teachers discussed:
-British/US troops infecting Native Americans with smallpox by giving them infected blankets -Trail of Tears and how Andrew Jackson was generally pretty horrible to Native Americans -Wounded Knee Massacre, and in general how much we (as Americans) screwed over the native people -a little bit about eugenics in the US -Watergate scandal -showed us a documentary about how Walmart achieves such low prices by brutal business practices (and has hurt many American companies by moving production to China)
in addition to your points above. I don't feel like my history education (solely from public school) was "largely a lot of propaganda".
Think about what meaningful questions are left unanswered. Why is it that any serious examination of the US' covert wars across the world is skipped entirely? Why is the entire era 1945-1991 painted in communist vs capitalist terms? The US participation in WW2 is reduced to "we saved europe and asia from hitler and japanese imperialism".
The overarching theme is of American moral superiority, unassailable founding principles, and a government by the people, for the people.
None of those are true, and I am thankful we live in an age when access to the writings of accurate historians is just a click away for those who care enough to discover.
The only major stuff I think I missed out on was the history of US involvement in Iran (of which I later learned in College history classes). But global covert actions (and not-so-covert: ie Vietnam War) during the Cold War era was definitely taught to me in general. High School History may have missed a few countries, but I hardly think it was propaganda from my perspective at least.
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The closest thing to "propaganda" I can think of was the Civil War saga frankly. Abraham Lincoln is considered an extreme hero up here in the North, who prevented our country from falling apart. Later in college, I learned that Southerners have a different perspective... even today. Extremely interesting to me.
Also, a friend of mine from Hawaii told me the Hawaiian perspective on the Annexation of Hawaii. Apparently... there is a bit of controversy on that subject in Hawaii that wasn't taught to me.
The only time I really got to study about the rest of the world was in a semester-long class that was optional! My AP History class was the closest thing that delved into the negative aspects of US history. I really didn't start questioning things until I read Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" shortly after graduating college.
What the were YOU doing in school? Mine was mostly a public education, so... plenty of "US mistakes" taught throughout US history from my perspective. Plenty of good and bad in history.
Middle School was mostly basic stuff, borderline propaganda from my memory. (But LA Riots were in fact covered in Middle School, perhaps because they were more "current events" rather than "history" at that point in time). But High School was filled with "TRUTH", in depth analysis and so forth. It was quite eye opening from my perspective. My High School US History class didn't cover "modern US History" however, and stopped in the late 50s. "Modern US History" was an elective at my high school... so my knowledge past the 50s becomes a bit incomplete.
The school cop even ensured a visit to many classes, to describe the rights of citizens in the state. Along the lines of: "In this state, you have the right to know a Cop's identity. If he refuses, take down the number on his car. Here's the police number where you can complain about this stuff". Very specific advice on how to cooperate, and if necessary, complain, about cops.
I know this was unusual and probably specific to the school cop who was assigned to my school. He was African American "and proud of it", to describe his attitude. (may have contributed to his emphasis on teaching citizens rights).
Part of the reason we find ourselves here is because the government has lied and kept what it isn't lying about in secrecy. A fundamental aspect of the Declaration of Independence is "...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." You cannot assume consent regarding government powers that have been built upon secrecy and lies. Likewise, complacency is not consent.
One of the most insidious and pernicious lies has been the implication that perfect safety is not only possible, but desirable. Note that this lie is being told by omission: US citizens are not being told that the government will make them perfectly safe, but that whatever the citizens find out about what is being done is being done for "national security" or to keep "the nation" safe.
The current uproar about government spying on its citizens, not to mention spying outside of "terrorist" suspicions, is evidence that spying programs conflict with the implication that safety is what is being provided by these programs.
A lot of these same Americans are betting on football and in NCAA pools, play poker, drank when they were underage and likely have underage kids who drink now.
So if you want them to wake up, it must be driven home over, and over and over, and over again, that these are the kinds of activities that could result in a SWAT team breaking down their doors, and maybe them or their good friends getting shot.
I think the main obstacle will be an unwillingness to comprehend that things have really gotten this bad.
IMO, it really started in earnest on 9/11. It's like people are in this strange state of psychological terror without realizing it. I swear, we've never recovered on the whole and it feels like something on the PTSD "spectrum".
Of course this fear has been fanned and used to justify an egregious power grab, costly wars, and untold billions in profits for the security-military-industrial complex, and so much more. See The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
Is it a coincidence that fear is so very profitable or that people are willing to give up their freedom to quell it?
When do we shake off this fear and say "enough!"?
- Obama has a secret "kill list" and has bragged about killing Americans without due process of law.
- We have widespread surveillance of our phones and email.
- The FBI admits that drones are now being used for domestic surveillance.
- The activist Supreme Court is continuing to gut our laws and give Big Business everything they want.
- The TSA is groping and nude scanning everyone, they've never caught a single terrorist, but are expanding beyond airports.
- Half of the inmates at Guantanamo have been cleared for release but are still detained a decade after incarceration.
- Half of America is in poverty.
- The Obama administration is trying to gut the Freedom of Information Act by denying certain doesn't even exist.
- The Supreme Court and various politicians are finding more ways of restricting the right to vote.
But people won't shut the fuck up about Kim and Kanye's baby.
It's 1984 meets Brave New World.
- Continued unconstitutional wars again "terrorism"
- Continued imperialism
- Whistleblower vilification
- Implicit taxation through unbridled govt debt
On Facebook, some friends are even afraid to "like" these stories now.
Most friends just ignore my posts. I can't tell whether they're apathetic, or whether they're suppressing it in fear. Or whether Facebook is throttling my posts using their "spam" algorithm. Maybe I've been throttled by my friends.
Most friends on Facebook post about how ugly or pretty something is, about the food they consume, or they're pushing some agenda of their own, as everybody has them nowadays.
Then you start wondering whether you're just being paranoid. Of course in normal pre-media life, such an inconsistent state of existence would be impossible. Can you imagine everybody around you being happy with ice-cream cones after being abused by yet another "lawful" breach of your liberty by the SWAT team, joined by some "celebrity"?
So it's easy to ignore the signs and live on earning your paycheck. Every day is exactly the same. You can't stay here, keep on moving on.
Dude, how do you even watch sports right now? There's so much work to do.
Yet days go on, everybody is chasing a paycheck or chasing a paper pyramid scheme. Or chasing fame, or chasing tail, anything to help take their minds off the now-ordinary horrid reality.
Some see the problems and can't help but feel that something is wrong, that something is unjust in this world. They're searching for a real purpose, as they stumble with potential solutions that have been tried and have failed.
While we ignore the children.
> I really don't think anyone is the US gov't has malice or ill will or a truly evil side.
Of course it depends on what you call "truly evil", but I believe that in any sufficiently large government (not just US) exist a significant number of sociopaths. It's just that, sociopaths exist, smart sociopaths also exist, and those are qualities that make it easy to find their way into politics. (and on an even more cynical note, a combination of qualities of particularly evil + intelligent + sociopathic, sounds like an even more likely profile to find itself in a position of power)
You have the America you paid for.
the more direct problem that there is no a preponderance of ex-soldiers, weapons, and an entire industrial base massively expanded and looking for civilian roles now everyone can see wars winding down and this kind of thing will be more prevalent.
All the forces mentioned in the article (including "militarisation" are conspiring in a self-reinforcing system)
It's hard to see how to move away ("what you think our boys in blue should not have body armour? APCs?")
That's so daft I don't know where to start. There's no such thing as an overreaction in war.
>the more direct problem that there is no a preponderance of ex-soldiers, weapons, and an entire industrial base massively expanded and looking for civilian roles now everyone can see wars winding down and this kind of thing will be more prevalent.
All these things were true to a much greater extent at the end of the Vietnam war and again at the end of the cold war.
There is when we (a) don't know who the enemies are and (b) live in a post-Geneva world where the international consensus is that yes, there are lines that can never be crossed.
b) We didn't gas or nuke them. In terms of the amount of conventional firepower you can bring to bear on enemy combatants... there's no limit.
There is hope, but it's going to take more hard work than most people believe to make things significantly better.
Australia has it's own issues on that front, look up Labor's recent proposal of data retention for electronic records or the infamous great firewall of Australia.
And as far as government's with regulatory zeal go, you've hit the motherload.
It's a lovely country (I've spent the last three years in Sydney and really and truly loved it) but don't kid yourself about the level of government intrusion in every. last. bloody. thing. It's maddening.
As I said, Australia isn't perfect by far. But at least the government isn't ignoring its core, founding principles like the US government has been doing the last couple decades.
I did mention nanny state in my original comment. To each their own. :)
Oh, it goes much, much farther than that.
The US Supreme Court has ruled (see Raich) that the federal government is justified in sending an armed raid into a terminally ill old lady's home because she allegedly was growing six marijuana plants under her doctor's supervision & approval for her sole personal use in accordance with state law. The "justified" rationale? Her home-grown state-legal personal-use herbs decreased demand in illegal inter-state commerce, therefor affected inter-state commerce, therefor was subject to federal regulation. I kid you not.
(Consequential tangent: if the court had not ruled that way, a pending related case (Stewart) would have permitted felons to home-build their own machine-guns. The court was faced with bizarre rulings whichever way they went with Raich.)
This is false. The related case would have left machine-gun building a matter of State law. Pure-Federalism is not the only possible form of governance, and it's not the US Constitution's approved form.
We were talking about federal laws and courts. I assume that in a short blog post I'm not expected to address the proliferation of overlapping jursidictional priorities and conflicts. But since you insist on taking the discussion where it wasn't going...
Fact is, majority of US states do permit machinegun ownership, so long as it complies with federal law; thus if federal law permits felons building machineguns (so long as it remains in-state), majority of states would not prohibit it. Now that the discussion has clarified that the remaining prohibitions would occur in a minority of more than four dozen states, and that the federal government would have at least had no say in the matter (as opposed to compulsive legalization in all encompassed jurisdictions), and that the discussion had not been addressing state laws (or if it did, it was that the applicable state ALLOWED the activity), that for most practical purposes the one-sentence summary of the horribly verbose & convoluted verdict in question and its consequences was sufficiently accurate?
(Pardon me. I'm getting increasingly irritated by exchanges that amount to: "X." "X? You're WRONG because you didn't address minor tangential issues Y, Z, P, D, and Q in comprehensive detail, all of which had little to do with the discussion at hand.")
A year later and they're still riding around in their RNC purchased bicycles, cruising in RNC speed boats and zipping around in RNC bobcats. The high-tech CCTV system is also still in use (and has yet to actually solve a single crime). It's bizarre.
The police petitioned to keep all the CCTV cameras and all the equipment they spent millions of dollars on to prepare.
I'm just saying, the militarization is at most a symptom (one of many), not the root cause for the US "war against the people".
The U.S. is a weird case, because there are these very clear abuses, and yet there's a culture of uncovering these abuses even when they're not happening to one's own group.
All the more reason to never speak to the police. Ever. What happened to 'protect AND serve'? The police have made their jobs harder by systematically turning every citizen into a criminal and forcing every person to not trust them. If I were ever to witness a crime I would hesitate to contact the police at this point out of fear that I would somehow be blamed/included/railroaded/etc... I starting to see how in other police states throughout history the citizens did and said nothing.
The breakdown of community happened. Now citizens are just the environment from which an officer can harvest points for his record.
He didn't know the guy was a cop.
Regardless, it is more than enough reason to never be "friends" with a cop.
I'm sure the cop's job did come up. And I'm sure he lied. Who would bother to check?
"With an accidental weapon discharge, police fatally shot the 68-year-old retiree, who was not the target of the warrant. Police instructed Mr. Stamps to lie on the floor, and Mr. Stamps complied. One officer moved towards Mr. Stamps to check for weapons. The officer's tactical equipment made his movement awkward, and he lost his balance and fell. As he did so, his weapon discharged. Mr. Stamps died from the single bullet wound to his upper chest."
Seriously? This is sick.
- Why did you shoot the suspect?
- My finger twitched.
- Eight times?
On the more serious note, I still can't imagine that report in any other way that the person was either accidentally shot or executed. I mean, what kind of tripping you'd have to do to shoot a person on the ground in the chest? Geometry doesn't add up.
Police forces seem to be totally exempt from, say, the ban on assault weapons or such in some of the States. Possibly a law that limits the weaponry that police forces can carry along with a reduction in civilian-owned guns might help curb some of these incidents involving trigger-happy cops.
What the hell do you think they're training for?