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Comment by montagg | Hacker News Reader

Vultures picking what away at parts of a corpse they can.

You see so many examples of this, just straight parasitical behavior, in at least American society. I don’t think the U.S. is economically where the Soviet Union was when it fell, but it’s rapidly approaching the civic dysfunction and deep corruption. You have to wonder, is this the fall of an empire or something like the corruption of the late 1800s and early 1900s, that created a backlash that corrected it and led to more prosperity? Dunno. We’ll see, if the vultures leave anything behind.

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I don't think cops extorting marginalized people is new, sadly. I actually think cops making life hard for people of color is the tradition of cops in america, all the way back to the slave-catching days.

Yes there are so many signs that what we have is a house of cards but like stock markets, even in real life, things can remain crazier way longer than they should.

One one hand the law and order is missing and on the other hand the people that make the laws are so divided. The people who should protect lack credibility on one hand and are demonized on the other hand. On one hand we do want to encourage rehabilitation of people who made mistakes and on the other hand some of those make businesses so hard to run. And when we make mistakes, let's say with liberal policies or the conservative side, there is no course correction since it takes elections and then maybe multiple cycles ... we have completely forgotten thr "apologize, fix the mistake and move on" method of working. We say we don't have monopolies but big business has all but killed individual initiative.

I think our fall, if it ever happens, will be magnificent. If it does not, that will be quite crazy too, at least for the bottom of the pyramid.

> The people who should protect lack credibility on one hand and are demonized on the other hand.

The former leads to the latter. Despite media (both fictional and non-fictional) largely carrying water for law enforcement, they just can't help but paint themselves in an incredibly unsympathetic, uncharitable light. [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/13/1199352063/seattle-officer-re... - a bodycam recording[2] of the SPD union VP speaking to the president shortly after an SPD officer ran down a woman using a crosswalk, by doing 74 in a 25 zone, at night, with no sirens. He didn't brake until after he hit her.

[2] Since she was 26, according to our fine boys in blue, her life had 'limited value'. This is what the guild's leadership think of the people they are supposed to 'protect and serve'... When the cameras are rolling.

When you're actually behaving like a demon, is it any surprise that you're demonized[3] for it?

[3] Demonized isn't even the right word. They'll face no consequences, as the SCC is both incapable, and entirely unwilling to reign in these animals.

I hope the latter. Many people are sick of corruption, but often they react to imaginary conpiratorial instances and ignore the corruption that is in plain sight.

It's dangerous to extrapolate too much from the early 1900s because the US not being ground zero for two World Wars, therefore able to serve as an industrial core to help rebuild the destruction, created economic opportunity the likes of which one hopes we never see again.

Lacking that destruction creating a huge market for American business, it's hard to predict what happens if America lets its domestic capitalism go off the rails in terms of service to its people again.

> created economic opportunity the likes of which one hopes we never see again.

What?

Poster is hoping for no more large wars

As a resident of Germany, I sincerely hope my neighbors paid attention in history class and won’t ever retry what produced that economic opportunity.

> just straight parasitical behavior

Federal and State governments are the biggest parasites with their armies of useless Admin workers. Incidentally, big Govt is also the main driver of malaise-causing inflation.

Start to starve them, redirect that labor/capital to useful endeavors and watch productivity and consumer confidence skyrocket.

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