“Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book”
salon.com
salon.com
He was a nice enough guy that used to hang out at Fast Eddies Sports Bar in Fairfax, VA. I saw him there often just tending a beer and minding his own business.
If you can believe it, he was an optometrist at a Wal-Mart that just measured eyeballs and wrote prescriptions. If he was a bookie (as alleged) then I never saw anything that gave him away.
I followed his story in the paper and was surprised to hear that a 17-year veteran of the Fairfax County Police was the one that shot him. Apparently, he said he was bumped and accidentally discharged his gun DIRECTLY INTO SAL'S CHEST.
The police department eventually settled with the family for negligent homicide. That was only after they fought tooth and nail to protect a cop that didn't know how to control a deadly weapon.
In the end, I think the cop got a 3 week suspension. AFAIK, he's still on the FCPD.
If an organization fights to protect bad guys, I don't care how much good they do: they are complicit in furthering criminal behavior. And they're in a position of trust, at that!
It's an open secret that cops lie to protect other cops.
Why do we allow this? Any other person in a special position of trust and responsibility that contravenes their duty gets _extra_ punishment.
Lon Horiuchi was an FBI sniper that shot Vicki Weaver in the back while holding her infant daughter in her arms: case dismissed. That cop that pepper sprayed those protesting kids at UC Davis, John Pike, was never even charged for "lack of evidence" (nevermind that video of him doing so was on every news show in the country that week). The FBI and BATFE set the Branch Davidians' home on fire, burning up the children inside.
Instead of meaningful outrage, we simply let cops get away with murder, literally.
Fuck the police.
Heh. First off, it's cops killing people, and then being squeamish about it (very contrary to how they'd deal with a civilian guilty of the same thing) that make people use these words.
Secondly, there are of course many factors that go into stuff like this; many benign like simple solidarity, some potentially sinister, like being involved in things you'd be shunned for by most of society - such as killing unarmed people and then lying about it - which is an incredibly powerful bonding agent.
> maximum legal effort
But here too, this means very different things on both sides of the "blue line", doesn't it.
Wait, what? If citizen's lied for each other in investigations, they'd be prosecuted.
What, the Internal Affairs division just doesn't exist? Does it not have enough power? Is that what's really being argued here?
Or is this just feel-good we're-the-good-guys they're-the-bad-guys rhetoric intended to undermine what capabilities they have, cause them to feel threatened and insecure in the midst of the citizenry they're supposed to be protecting, and motivating them to develop a similar and responsive antagonistic attitude that is precisely the seed of a police state?
Is the argument "they started it"? Is that the level of discourse that a mature, educated citizenry ought to engage in?
Fuck people like sneak. All they're good for is exacerbating problems that exist, making it that much harder to fix, fulfilling their own prophecies of doom and gloom, to no useful end other than making themselves feel self-important. It's like discovering database corruption and going, "Hell, let's run DELETE in with random WHERE clauses and see what happens. Because my job title says VP of Marketing."
In fact yes. Many police departments do not have "Internal Affairs". Where they nominally exist, they are rarely staffed by a separate group of people, rather "internal affairs" work is handled by the same people as everything else. The same people behind the same silent blue wall...
Hollywood depictions of "Internal Affairs" are largely a "Hollywood thing".
Even if you could, that would be a hell of a lot of money. In many cases you would be damn near doubling the size of police departments.
If you can't control your temper, why are you even participating in the discussion here?
Personal attacks like that aren't acceptable here, and I'd think you would know that by now after three plus years. It's disgusting to see that level of discourse here.
> If you can't control your temper, why are you even participating in the discussion here?
Because http://xkcd.com/386/ Stop being wrong and I'll go away.
Seriously, if you want to whine about the level of discourse, then you're welcome to start with the person I originally responded to. But you won't, will you? Because you agree with him, so his emotional outburst is okay.
It's about as far from an emotional outburst as one can get.
Don't sweat it. I don't.
Are we still railing against rhetoric? The argument isn't they started it, it's "they have been granted tremendous power, so they need to accept accountability."
Yes. "Fuck the police" really captures that argument well.
If an organization fights to protect bad guys, I don't care how much good they do: they are complicit in furthering criminal behavior. And they're in a position of trust, at that!
It's an open secret that cops lie to protect other cops.
Why do we allow this? Any other person in a special position of trust and responsibility that contravenes their duty gets _extra_ punishment.
Lon Horiuchi was an FBI sniper that shot Vicki Weaver in the back while holding her infant daughter in her arms: case dismissed. That cop that pepper sprayed those protesting kids at UC Davis, John Pike, was never even charged for "lack of evidence" (nevermind that video of him doing so was on every news show in the country that week). The FBI and BATFE set the Branch Davidians' home on fire, burning up the children inside.
Instead of meaningful outrage, we simply let cops get away with murder, literally.
Fuck the police."
What you read: "Fuck the police."
Is it really any wonder that you are having problems with this conversation? There is a lot of content in that comment; you appear to have ingested none of it.
I smell bacon!
I love the "bad apple" metaphor because when you remember to say the whole thing it becomes clear that it is actually an argument against ignoring issues in an organization because only a few people are the "cause". If a police department "only has a few bad apples" then (according to the metaphor) those bad apples must be removed swiftly and decisively or the integrity of the entire department will be compromised.
I love this "bad apple" tidbit, it's going in the top drawer of the toolbox. :D
Relevant SMBC http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=3025#comic
Prove that. You can't, cause it's a negative. It seems much, much more likely that "The times these things are uncovered and get national press attention is rare." For the few times that are, how many are not, 10x? 100x? I can't know, but I 100% doubt we catch 100% of these things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
But guess what cops are human too ergo they will on occasion make mistakes, lie, steal, cheat etc.
That's not to say that any of the things you mentioned are ethical or that I agree with them at all, but it's not too difficult to see the difference between being victimized by an external force (which is essentially just garden-variety "humans are shitty"-ness) and being victimized by an entity that is supposed to represent you.
They can construe, manipulate and torque that to mean whatever they want or rather the lack of whatever they want.
Then we must update the motto: <strike>protect and</strike> serve.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/to_serve_but_not...
Nah, never happens.
Politics and law are sideshows to the material facts of physical reality, watching people constantly debate the edicts of hopelessly out of touch political figureheads and their bureaucratic lackeys as if it had an effect on fixing the problems they cause constantly mystifies me.
The police do not have a duty to protect you specifically unless they have told you they are going to protect you. This means they are not liable for preventing a crime from happening to you. That's all it means. It does not touch on the issue of whether or not an officer who witnesses a crime being perpetrated upon you is responsible for intervening, which is what the case you linked to is about. I don't know much about that, and from what I understand that particular case has not been decided yet.
>Politics and law are sideshows to the material facts of physical reality, watching people constantly debate the edicts of hopelessly out of touch political figureheads and their bureaucratic lackeys as if it had an effect on fixing the problems they cause constantly mystifies me.
I agree with you that it is a frustrating situation. I would ask you, as an engineer, to consider the enormous complexity of a system required to provide social structure for 300 million people, and that doing so may require some very specific decisions to be made, that while seemingly small have a massive impact.
This ruling, and others like it hint at a fundamental flaw in constitutional law and how most people perceive their relationship with the state, particularly in regard to social contract theory. These rulings call into question the very legitimacy of state authority.
Let's assume for a moment there is a social contract with the state. Then, as in all contracts, there is a reciprocal obligation. Specifically, as a citizen, I have a duty of allegiance (obey state laws, pay taxes, etc.) in return for the duty of protection, from my government. Since the state itself has ruled it has no constitutional duty to protect, then the contract is inviolate, and long since void. In other words, there is no duty of allegiance to the state per the rulings of the courts if one takes social contract theory to be valid.
In my opinion, police corruption is one example of a foundational flaw in our current institution of governance: rule by means of coercion.
I think you are assuming Warren has a broader impact than it does. The state does have an obligation to protect the public at large, and to do so uniformly (unless a special relationship is created). The state has not ruled it has no constitutional duty to protect you, it has ruled it has no constitutional duty to prevent every crime that occurs. Again, if the opposite were held true the state could be sued out of existence in its own court. There was no other way for this case to be decided.
Essentially the state has ruled it cannot be perfect in terms of crime prevention, and considering the backlash against the NSA wiretapping that much of HN has been extremely concerned about, it seems that the state is not frequently rewarded for attempts to get closer to proactively preventing crime. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I don't disagree with you about police corruption, but it has absolutely nothing to do with Warren.
The public is caught in a catch-22: it is illegal to defend ourselves physically against attackers (we can be held liable for harming an attacker, and often for posessing a self-defense weapon, and so criminals are emboldened, knowing we are defenseless), and yet the police provide no guarantee of protection against crime, and in fact are frequent perpetrators of violent accidents against civilians.
Like sheep to slaughter we go.
State protect property. There's nothing ambiguous about that.
Only problem with society is that you watch much super man cartoons and thing the state is there to protect the oppressed.
I completely agree, whenever politicians, CEOs of megacorporations, field-grade military officers and senior noncommissioned officers, local government officials, district attorneys, and intelligence agents break the law, the punishment is ALWAYS extremely severe isn't it? I mean, it must really suck to have to retire and collect a gigantic paycheck every month or a multimillion dollar severance package. And then have everyone forget about it a few weeks later so you can make a comeback in the political arena.
Your average cop and his buddies are of course going to look out for each other, they are usually the ones under the bus when the higher ups go on a witch hunt
In my own city, I was appalled by the spectacle of hundreds of police officers protesting in and around a courthouse where officers and union officials involved in a ticket fixing ring were being arraigned.
Ref: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/nyregion/officers-unleash-...
And this is why I don't trust cops at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_cases_of_p...
Although I don't know anything about the facts, and it might have been technically correct by that Wikipedia editor, this just feels as the opposite of justice.
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...
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.
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.
-----------------
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.")
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
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...
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"
"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.
I'm of the mind that any place that allows free commentary ultimately becomes a political discussion board, and HN is proving this well. It used to be that HN was a place to get away from that - but it looks like these days it's becoming not much different than the comment section on any political newspaper.
It isn't difficult to conclude that the foundation of support for authoritarianism from the general population comes from a desire to preserve order, and a fear that unregulated or unrecorded speech and communication is more likely to enable bad changes and events than good changes.
Entrepreneurs however tend toward believing that disruptive innovation on balance does more good than bad, and believe that one of the hurdles that must be surmounted is to undermine the influence of established businesses and centers of power that have a stake in limiting innovation.
What has made HN interesting is the fact that it was boring to the vast majority of people on this planet. The topics were generally speaking on a very specific set of subjects that you largely had to be in the technology world (and of a certain technical disposition) to relate to.
The relative boringness of these topics led to comments by folks who found them particularly fascinating, setting a high community standard and discouraging soapboxing (comparatively speaking, of course -- I'm under no illusions that HN was ever the most pristine and idealistic place). For a long time I thought PG did a good job of enforcing that culture by shutting down off-topic conversations and keeping the focus fairly intense.
The problem with political posts is that they are often extremely relevant to hackers, especially these days. But everyone finds politics interesting, and everyone (myself included) believes their political beliefs are equally valid. Watching snarky posts and soapboxes get rewarded does send a message that this is how to get noticed. Long-term, I fear this fundamentally coarsens the level of discourse by making it easier to dismiss the beliefs of others and making it easier to participate in situations where I feel ignorant.
Unfortunately, I think there's only one way I know of to stop this -- which would be for PG and/or the moderators to take an active role in enforcing the "no politics" rule that's already in the guidelines. But I think they're perhaps legitimately concerned about censorship -- anathema to hackers -- and have kept a loose hand. Beyond that I'm not sure what they can do.
On the other, I also agree that they mostly detract from the "unique" HN topics, BUT I like discussing them WITH the HN crowd (not with whomever might hang around on other sites).
I also feel like I can contribute more to these kind of posts than to others that I also find interesting and more on-topic (Javascript library for reactive documents, how to hack a high-performance board for a notebook, etc...)
Would it be possible to "wall off" the politics posts from the HN "main topic" posts? Much like what's done with the Ask HN posts...
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.
My local police department has a "command center" rv and telescopic lookout post that the Feds paid like $3M for. The machine guns are usually bought with seized drug money, and tactical training paid for try the Feds. Most cities don't need paramilitary squads, so they end up using them for stupid stuff because they get to have fun, or they get extra overtime for a detail.
Fire departments are similar. A local volunteer fire department near me got a $1M state grant for some insane fire truck with all sorts of gizmos and an aerial platform that can reach 5 stories up -- in a town with no buildings higher than 2 stories and about 70 total calls per year. (I think they had to call in another department for a fire because the thing is so big that it cannot make it down roads) Total waste of taxpayer resources, but at least the firemen won't kill you!
Everyone is happy to see a fireman or a EMT. Having police answer routine fireman calls, and "wear that hat" during the call, would go a long way.
What they DO need to justify is the overtime and the extra pay for being in the SWAT detail. That's where driving tanks through buildings to liberate and euthanize chickens comes in.
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.
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?
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.
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.
And people question why the government collecting intelligence on innocent civilians is a problem.
There's a critical piece missing in these discussions- the global banking cartel that has corrupted all of our political and social institutions. Until their agenda and activities are included in the scope of our analysis, things will just keep getting worse.
http://www.restorethefourth.net/ comes to mind.
Even then, hammers have uses. People like this don't.
I don't know if this is the case, but in a country where we barely get that A leads to B, we might want to start taking a hard look at A to B to C to D.
No one is complaining that the fire department sucks.
Looks like another good use of Google glasses, if used by protesters en masse.
For example:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/barts-cell-phone-shutd...
Therefore, I propose a rule:
Discharge a firearm while serving as a cop, no matter the reason, and that's it, you're no longer a cop. Take your toys and go home, thank you for your service.
Yes, you'd fire good people, but you'd also remove any incentive for less-than-good people to act irresponsibly and ensure they thought twice about using lethal force. I'd argue that by far this is the greater good.
Would you really want someone to protect you at the risk of losing their job?
We ask people in the military to protect us at the risk of losing their lives, why is it so much to ask for a cop to risk his job?
Edit: I'm coming from a military background and the lack of accountability there is disturbing too. I think people with responsibility to protect and/or kill other people should be risking their jobs regularly. Otherwise, there is no real accountability. See here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/general-...
Because it's an occupation that takes training and experience to do well?
But by all means, if you want a bunch of untrained newbies running around with guns and the legal standing to use them on the citizenry, your idea's a great one.
The problem isn't police using their guns. It's the Blue Wall of Silence when they do.
Well, he had it coming. Excessive use of police force for sure but I can't feel sorry for the guy, only for the animals harmed before and during the police raid.
Edit for the downvoters: the fact that you're not affected by the suffering of animals, even for the ones that you barbarically eat, says a lot about your degree of civilization.
I didn't think I had to repeat myself on HN.
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.
This is not really a justification of all the shit they do rather an attempt to explain the insanity.
The reasons behind why every PD has all of this paramilitary gear is well-studied but best left for another thread; the fact is they have it, and when they wear it they are more likely to behave like any other human being who finds himself suddenly hiding behind full body armor.
It's not the police that's the problem, it's the gear, and departments who ignore the mental impact of having it & don't adjust their training to match.
Dump money into personal lawsuits against officers committing negligent attacks such that they are financially ruined. Attend town meetings and demand sever cutbacks in the budgets of police departments acting this way. Put lobbying dollars to work and get change from the top down.
What the hell do you think they're training for?
Lotteries like this are a tax on people bad at math. How is this morally superior to an office pool?
Though I do think viewing this as a "hit" enters the realm of tinfoil hats,
Most of the time, yes. Some lottery games with fixed odds and variable payouts have rare moments when the expected value of a ticket turns positive. I'm fairly good at math and I always play powerball every one or two years when this is the case.
If you want these abuses to stop then you should be actively supporting the end of this war. By actively supporting, I mean be willing to discuss it with anybody who is willing to listen.
And we'll deserve it.
Cops in UK don't carry guns.
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.
"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.