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Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

It's gonna die because the leadership of the democratic party is mostly authoritarians and the leadership of the republican party is in the back pocket of law enforcement and party leadership is who controls the pac dollars which controls who gets reelected and who loses their primary.

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To be fair there are a ton of cop-sympathizing democratic politicians. Even the supposed super progressive Mayor of Seattle who claims to have a track record of police reform is extremely pro-cop and constantly authorized the use of flash bags, tear gas, and other extreme measures for BLM protests.

I doubt we'll ever see any influential politician make a real push for police reform. That would be suicide, and not of the political kind.

What matters most is GOP/Federalist society federal judges.

If GOP activists hadn't controlled the Supreme Court for the past 50 years (despite the GOP losing most presidential elections during that time) this and many other areas of American jurisprudence would look significantly different.

Asset forfeitures are "done by cops", but the laws giving them power are written and passed by politicians and directed by attorneys.

Man, for a nation founded by rebelling against a tyrant, and known for its can-do mentality, you sure have a pretty defeatists attitude when it comes to defeating authoritarians...

Short of having a revolution like the people who started this country, what's your suggestion for defeating authoritarians? It's difficult (more like impossible) to do on a legal basis when all branches of government are corrupted.

What do you suggest americans do? Democracy doesn't work because several powerful groups lobby to keep civil forfeiture. There's no way they can resist this. Their government can label any citizen a threat to national security and strip them of whatever rights they still have. Their dragnet surveillance allows them to monitor and stop any organized opposition. Attempting revolution is unwise since that'd probably result in the "terrorists" getting curbstomped by the US military forces.

I don't think it's due to corruption per se. Americans just have to be convinced to care about civil asset forfeiture more than they care about other things. Most people probably think of it as something that happens to other people who were probably crime-adjacent anyway (I don't agree with this line of thinking). If you got enough single-issue voters who cared about civil asset forfeiture, it would go away.

Vote different people into office.

Americans aren’t given a free choice thanks to their two-party system.

Well, you asked so...

Sacrifice time at digital “salons” and non-essential economic activity.

When 40% of jobs are work from home, strike is a matter of closing a laptop.

Jumping straight to lock and load is ridiculous. SOPA blackout and teacher strikes have gotten results. Police budgets are being redirected.

Encryption is a thing; stay out of cloud services if you do not want to be snooped on. General home computing and k8s+kilo, torrents... teach people to use them in support of the effort. They’re open source; improve the UX.

To be frank, McConnell and the rest are well aware of the French Revolution. Serious discourse in that direction, a show of organization effort would unblock legislative capture.

In America it’s illegal to speak of overthrowing the government, or rising up to defend rights by force. There’s really nothing you can do. The elections are over, the citizens and what they think doesn’t matter anymore. There is absolutely nothing any one of you can do, short of a Revolution, that will change anything over the next 2-4 years.

> In America it’s illegal to speak of overthrowing the government, or rising up to defend rights by force.

IIUC this is partially true. Advocating for overthrow of government seems banned by 18 U.S. Code § 2385 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2385) (Thanks to https://nitter.net/crimeaday for teaching me this https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91IzF+claGL... — appalling it hasn’t been struck down as unconstitutional).

But OTOH, IIRC people can, have, and have won in court after defending certain rights by force — eg. shooting police officers breaking into their homes without clearly identifying themselves and presenting a warrant. Eg. Kenneth Walker IIUC has not been convicted of any of the charges against him, and though the legal drama drags on, there’s precedent in his favor.

I wonder if the issue is that Americans are "Amusing Themselves to Death" [1]. Tristan Harris read this excerpt at the very end of his interview with Joe Rogan.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7942005-what-orwell-feared-...

It will get even bigger. "Defund the police" will turn police into for-profit self-funded organization :-)

That might not be a bad thing. The police would be responsible for their actions, rather than shielded by law.

Huh? Defunding the police doesn't change whether they are shielded by laws. Did you imagine the parent comment was describing "defund the police" meaning no more police and only having private security companies? That's not how I read it.

Huh? Read the comment above. This is in response.

> It will get even bigger. "Defund the police" will turn police into for-profit self-funded organization

I don't read that to mean that there will be no police and just private security companies. I read it to suggest there will still be police, protected by the same laws, able to abuse things in the same way, except they will rely entirely on their own funding via shit like Civil Asset Forfeiture

I used to wonder how cyberpunk scenarios of for profit police who would only investigate crimes if the victim paid them could ever come about. Thanks for clearing up this confusion, I never would have guessed that it would be motivated by warped social justice, not end-game libertarianism.

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