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Comment by scarecrowbob | Hacker News Reader

"But it seems like not the useful insight given a state the clearly has asymetrically greater power than the populace?"

Is your assumption true? That is, leaving aside the fact that the police are ostensibly part of the populace, how would some police and a single APC pacify even a couple of blocks of citizens without the cooperation of those citizens?

Personally, and I realize that this is opinion, I do not believe your assumption is true, and as such is a pretty good example of why the ideas you are critiquing are useful- it is difficult to see the larger system of power described by the ability or inability to motivate people.

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> how would some police and a single APC pacify even a couple of blocks of citizens without the cooperation of those citizens?

Assuming that the police have no restriction in the use of force, it would be very simple for them to pacify a rather large area with an APC and Police. All they have to do is kill a few people who are out of line, and the rest will cower.

No single or small group of citizens in the US really has the ability to stand up to even a single measly APC. The firepower required to stop one is beyond what anybody outside the US enforcement structure can realistically obtain. You may be able to limit its movement with well constructed roadblocks, but harming the vehicle or its passengers with an assortment of shotguns, handguns and IEDs is not reasonable to expect (given they were explicitly designed to withstand these threats).

>"the rest will cower"

This is one aspect of sort of complicity with power that's being discussed. Sometimes, people decide en masse that a certain way of life is worth dying for, so we know there are other responses to armed pacification.

Not that this is always a bad thing. It's pretty great that most of us obey the state's injunction to not wantonly kill each other.

I find it extremely distasteful to describe backing down in the face of slaughter as "complicity." If that's the sort of thinking that follows naturally from the model of power dynamics being discussed here, then I think the model is likely intensely flawed.

On one hand, you are correct that it's an ethical problem.

But on the other hand I think it's more salient to understand that, say, the students shot down at Kent State were murdered and the general population of the country was on the side of the National Guard.... that's the kind of complicity that most people live under, the same complicity that believes people executed by police for non-compliance deserve their fates.

On one hand, it probably really is a good thing that we are generally aligned toward lawfulness, but at the same time it does make us complicit when the people charged with upholding that law use it towards criminal ends-- which is quite common in the US.

If you actually read the thread up your position on it, you'd know that you were equating an unwilling to challenge tanks rolling through your streets due a fear of getting shot with an approval of such tanks rolling through your streets.

It seems to me that intellectuals spouting this kind of nonsense wide-up complicit to power and not in a it's-OK-cause-everyone-is, kind of way.

Complicity is a loaded term, so I can see why you'd feel that way. Perhaps it'd be better to say that such behavior enables the slaughterers to do what they do. As for the ethical question of whether a particular instance of backing down was right or wrong, hopefully our analysis of power dynamics avoids answering such questions and focuses on, well, the dynamics of power. That's not to say that such questions are irrelevant, they're just a different field, like the quantitative differences between the light emitted by configurations of dyes and the feeling evoked by a certain painting.

...and this is where you lose everyone. There's a gulf of difference between technical capability and legal right.

Campus police don't "just kill a few people".

The recent regime changes termed "Arab Spring" provide some evidence that killing some of the population can sometimes further inflame the populate rather than intimidating them.

When the state has access to nukes and the populace doesn't, how can this statement not technically be true? It seems like the ability literally wipe cities off the face of the earth means that you have the permanent upper hand, in terms of power.

Further, what you call "cooperation" I think would largely would be a lack of organization. The ability to organize can grant immense power, and when people talk about the power of large crowds like this I think there's usually an unstated assumption of "if they were to spontaneously act in great--or at least adequate--coordination." I don't think it's fair to assess power in terms of something like a body count, and to ignore the power granted by organization.

> When the state has access to nukes and the populace doesn't, how can this statement not technically be true? It seems like the ability literally wipe cities off the face of the earth means that you have the permanent upper hand, in terms of power.

Because that's not a credible threat. Nuclear weapons are antithetical to the goals of a government in conflict with it's own people.

"I don't think it's fair to assess power in terms of something like a body count, and to ignore the power granted by organization."

I generally agree, but my larger point is that it isn't a good idea to assess power in terms of firepower.

> Is your assumption true?

No, it's not true. The state has vastly inferior power compared to the populace at large, at least in the U.S. However, the state is able to, in most cases, choose when and how it engages it's enemies so that it faces an inferior force on it's own terms.

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