Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Rage. That is what I feel. I hope the town is bankrupted and the officers, doctors, and judge who contributed to this are all put behind bars, where, ideally, they'll get to experience what unwanted anal searching is like.

The police are totally out of control in this country. They are out of control because they are untouchable. That was the lasting legacy of the Rodney King acquittals: you can do what you want if you're a cop. You can beat a black man senseless for nothing. You can beat a homeless man to death with your fists. You can pepper spray, tackle, and beat peaceful protesters dancing in a public square. You can smash people's cameras who are trying to document your abuses. You can send SWAT teams to the home of the mayor of a small town, shoot the family dog dead, track the blood all over the house, put the family on their knees for hours with guns to their heads, and then when it turns out it was a mistake, leave, laughing and saying "you're lucky we didn't arrest you."

Almost certainly it will get much worse before it gets better. Armed with ever better surveillance, city police are going to get much more powerful. And power corrupts. I think we'll be hearing about a lot more of these kinds of abuses.

Eventually, 400M Americans are going wake up, realize that they've had enough, and effect real, lasting change.

"That was the lasting legacy of the Rodney King acquittals: you can do what you want if you're a cop."

To a propagandized society, yes, that the revolutionary truth about the initial acquittals. The bourgeois truth is that the LAPD police academy cheaped out on baton training, excluding the normal sections that would have allowed them to restrain King with a minimum of force.

Given that, they had exactly three choices: shoot him like a dog, beat him into submission, or I suppose let him free to commit more crimes while intoxicated.

I guarantee you the message sent by the second prosecution in an area and situation where conviction was much more likely (2 out of 3) has had a lot of very bad effects, including the police resorting to their firearms a lot more.

"Eventually, 400M Americans are going wake up, realize that they've had enough, and effect real, lasting change."

Perhaps all this will help you understand why we're buying guns of military utility at unprecedented rates? With the exception of last August, for around 40 months NICS tracked guns sales have been higher than those of the preceding month a year previously (source is the NSSF). Note that the starting point of this massive surge is well beyond the period of fear that Obama would take effective gun control steps and way before Newtown.

It's ... amazing. The world's stocks of $150 (in today's prices) standard bolt action military surplus rifles have been exhausted, that's from more than a century's production of them.

I'm not sure if we're gearing up for a civil war/general resistance to this sort of shit, the inevitable consequences of the government running out of money, or things less dire in the runup to one or both, but we're getting thoroughly prepared, which should terrify the police-judicial complex. And may well be doing so.

As I and other keep saying, this will not end well.

>As I and other keep saying, this will not end well.

I hope not. My hope is that we can outsmart violent revolution, and do something much better. In the end, we are a functioning democracy, and in 6 years theoretically we could replace every elected official in the land, the President, every governor, every congress person, and every local sheriff and police chief and judge. It would require an almost unimaginable level of cooperation, and it wouldn't address the bureaucracy problem, but literally in 6 years all of the elected decision-makers could be new. We could eliminate parties, hold a new constitutional convention, and adopt policies aimed at capping the complexity of our legal code. And all it takes is 6 years of cooperation.

To me, that's a great outcome. And I suppose if you got the majority of Americans in most places to agree with you, then you'd actually have a chance to get it done.

That's a rather amazing posited jump for a nation in a cold civil war that's getting ever hotter, one that's been in effect ever since the Progressives became a major political force, e.g. no later than Teddy Roosevelt.

What can possibly make you think more than a century of division, which I rate as reaching civil war status in Woodrow Wilson's 2nd term almost a century ago, will magically change. Rodney King expressed the hope pretty well, "Why can't we all just get along?" but that's not happened.

I have my own ideas as to why, going back to the antebellum period, but they're irrelevant to the observation that this is clearly getting worse, and arguably at an accelerating rate. Add to that the inevitable Federal government bankruptcy within, say, a generation---are you proposing you could get a majority of Americans to become Tea Party types, refusing ever more "free" money from the state and after cutting enough of the government's expenses to start paying down the accumulated 17 trillion in debt???---while none of us can predict the time or shape of things to come, there's no way it will end well.

As Kipling noted in "The Gods of the Copybook Headings". Or I could say you're pushing hope over experience---and I think we've had enough Hope and Change to last a generation or three....

* Well, there's one possibility, nanotech resulting in a post scarcity society fixing the fiscal problem, but it wouldn't fix the divisions, and its development has been ruthlessly suppressed by the existing science establishment who want that money for themselves.

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