Comment by Chathamization | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Chathamization | Hacker News Reader

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> “Trust us, we'd never use it against the people it's supposed to protect” isn't enough.

Especially because it's been so horribly abused in the past. Take this case in Manassas, Virginia. 17 year old texts a picture of his penis to his 15 year old girlfriend. The police find out, charge the 17 year old with distributing child pornography, and take pictures of his penis saying they need it for evidence[1]. They then get a warrant from the courts demanding that the 17 year old send them a picture of his erect penis[2]. And if he didn't comply:

> If he doesn't cooperate, the Manassas City Police Department has threatened to take him to a hospital and medically induce an erection with an injection, attorney Jessica Harbeson Foster toldThe Washington Post.

Eventually they backed off when it received widespread attention in the press. Later it turned out that the detective in charge of the case was a pedophile[3]:

> A Manassas City police detective, who was the lead investigator in a controversial teen “sexting” case last year, shot and killed himself outside his home Tuesday morning as police tried to arrest him for allegedly molesting two boys he met while coaching youth hockey in Prince William County.

When I read stories like this, I'm at a loss for words. No one in the justice system realized how terrible this is? Not only does this show the problem with giving law enforcement this kind of power, but I think it shows that we really need some sort of public advocacy department to monitor and go after this sort of abuse (someone to watch the watchmen).

The kid in the case got probation, by the way.

[1] http://time.com/2971033/virginia-police-search-warrant-photo... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/09/virgin... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/manassas-...

This case is such atrocious abuse of power. The fallout from this case did not affect nearly enough people. Think of all the enablers of this behavior at the various stages. The patriarchy has much of America in their clutch at various levels of so-called "public" service. Why was this man never reported? Everyone covered up for him. Standard operating procedure for America.

If you don't believe me, this headline is from june 2017. Not even Hillary Clinton, as an NY senator, chose to tackle this issue.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-ends-child-marriage-ra...

What does this have to do with the so-called patriarchy?

The US, historically, comes out of a patriarchal tradition, where men have substantially more power. It's declining over time, but it's still significant. E.g., look at all the religious people who talk explicitly about how God wants men to be the head of the household.

The connection here is that abusers make use of power structures to protect themselves from the consequences of abuse. This will happen with any sort of power structure; abusers are wily. But it's especially problematic with a power structure built on gender, because our sexual roles are also strongly gendered. That leads to behavior patterns like "old boys' club" and "boys will be boys", where men are more likely to trust other men, and to act in ways that support the people most like them.

So if we were coming out of a non-patriarchal past, we would still have abusers exploiting whatever the power structure was, but the patterns would be different.

Not OP, but I understand the OPs use of patriarchy as to mean a hierarchical power structure which justifies itself with the claim of protecting the weak, but in the end is just a repressive hierarchy.

You have been 'well educated' indeed to equate patriarchy with top down control structures. This will make the bitter pill of swapping the dreaded patriarchy with a technocracy, that will most certainly have a 'controlling' interest in intimate matters, much easier to swallow.

I remember a sermon about god and fatherhood in which the pastor explained that god's commands must be followed because god loves us and god wants to protect us. The pastor explained god's wrath towards those who fail to follow him as the wrath of love. As an example, he told how one day his young daughter had run into the street and almost been hit by a truck. Afterwards he hit her repeatedly. He said he hit her, and was angry with her, not becaues he hated her, but because he loved her and wanted to protect her from wanting to run into the streat again. To my mind, this fatherlike aproach to power and control IS the patriarchy:

In christianity - god is the father of all men - the pastor is refered to as "father" - the father is refered to as father

All of them are there to protect and all of them must be obeyed.

And it feels to me that the police are also a kind of father. They are also there to protect and they too must be obeyed.

I do see a technocracy as being a patriarchy as well. After all it's not just Xi, but Xi Dada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnRo9AMT8FI

And he too is there to protect and he too must be obeyed.

Edit: And this is what I hate about HN. I spent time thinking about and writing this post. And the more time you spend writing a comment on HN, the fewer people will read it.

I would think that any organizational structure for a 'society' entails control mechanisms. And patriarchy predates monothesim. Patriarchy is a contract between the sexes, as a matter of fact. You can flip the sex bit, but there remains a control structure.

Just think how oppressive the matriarchy of the beehive must be to those poor little princesses killed in their crib by the ascendant queen mother, not to mention armies of 'drones' working their ass off for the glory of their queen. Naturaly, and it is in fact true, those little princesses had to go bye bye for the greater good of the hive.

(& do we really want to discuss the "pedophile" matriarchs of the Bonobos .. :)

p.s. I simply can not relate to your notion of the police as father figures.

Everyone I disagree with has been indoctrinated; only I can think for myself. Is that right?

It is not a question of disagreement. OP is repeating a falacy. And when large numbers of otherwise thoughtful people repeat a falacy then "indoctrination" is on the menu of possibilities.

Do please identify this 'falacy' for us.

"The patriarchy" has evolved to mean "something I don't like" so it's a pretty accurate use of the term.

It means what it always meant, the tree of men who control things. It's just become more widely used because the fact that everything is controlled by men in authority doesn't need feminism to be true, it just needed feminism to be pointed out. It's just as true no matter what your concerns about authority are. Not using the word is just being unnecessarily vague.

It's akin to something that bothers me personally; when people refer to "America" when they mean "White America." Yes, the recent rise of the alt-right has put on display an undercurrent of discontent in America, but when you say that, you're not being specific in a way that is distorting.

Words evolve and our usage changes, but there are better and worse ways for this change to happen. Changes that bring ambiguity unintentionally are generally bad. e.g. "something I don't like".

I think they're referring to the omerta-like man code that keeps people from snitching on bad apples. Although I think that's really tribalism, more than patriarchy.

When you imagine the archetype of a person with both the desire and ability to throw teenagers in prison for sharing pictures of their own bodies, it's hands-down an old rich white guy.

So the patriarchy is something you imagine. Interesting, although it does confirm a couple of longstanding suspicions in the area.

Do you assert that that's not the primary demographic you believe is pushing things like this?

A major problem is that there are no consequences whatsoever for the judge that rubberstamped this ridiculous warrant.

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