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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

You cannot compare these two levels of violence. Or if you compare them you should add a [fractal] distance between them.

There are a lot of issues in USA (and many other countries around the world!) But here you can see that the world doesn't know how to respond to one country attacking a neighbour in another continent in XXI. Which is very concerning taking into account we are in a world with very advanced (and expensive) weaponry and bureaucrats who just warm their seats.

It is obviously not enough to tweet or TikTok... all the respect to HN where we learn, and have great and deep discussions oriented to action, even if they are oriented mainly to startups. Startups are just an example of confronting and transforming realities.

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> You cannot compare these two levels of violence. Or if you compare them you should add a [fractal] distance between them.

> There are a lot of issues in USA

Why can't you compare? A number of people in minority communities are concerned that US stop-and-frisk stops are used to incarcerate them, kill them, or rob from them. What is the difference?

https://www.africanamerica.org/topic/civil-asset-forfeiture-...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-11-12/stop-a...

> You cannot compare these two levels of violence.

The comparison is between two things, the police forcing you to give them access your phone for no explicit reason, or the police forcing you to allow them to physically and invasively search your whole body for no explicit reason. You are conflating that comparison with a bunch of other things happening external to the specific actions the police are allowed to do.

The reasons why both are happening doesn't mean you can't objectively compare whether what the police are doing is acceptable outside of the larger situation that is causing them to do it. The question is if one seems unacceptable, shouldn't the other be too? If you want to talk about levels of violence between these two, stop and frisk certainly seems to be something closer to approaching physical violence, or at least the greater potential for it, then searching your phone.

You CAN compare oranges to apples.

Your argument is completely valid except there is a missing [postmodern?] point at a meta level: you are changing the focus of a terrible event that should be solved at a global scale to an event that could be handled at a local scale, AND in US it should be much simpler than in Russia.

In US you have a lot of ways you can do that and I am always amazed that the US democracy is failing at a basic level when I compare with righteous US people who achieved amazing stuff in the US past. If you don't show your mobile founds you can protect you by the law.

In Russia there are much fewer options and civilians are risking their life at an amazing level. Law does not exist.

So how can the people who are targeted - mostly minorities - use “Democracy” when the majority either doesn’t care about the mistreatment of minorities or even cheerlead it? Not to mention that politicians are afraid of blowback from police unions and the majority who support them since people don’t get stopped for “driving while White”.

I don't have the answer but I think there are enough creative people in US to find it and advance the state of the art in politics. Event if it is not in US it can happen anywhere.

I also think that the statement "software is eating the world" have not touch politics enough but will happen. Not talking about FB and social media in general.

> You cannot compare these two levels of violence. Or if you compare them you should add a [fractal] distance between them.

I didn’t intend to. Just that the land of the free isn’t so free when police are charged with randomly (or not so randomly) searching people.

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