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Comment by DominikR | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn't your society resist? Parts of your police is now equiped like an army on a battlefield and money can be seized without any reasoning.

And then there's NSA spying, torture and drone executions of suspected terrorists (even US citizens) without trial.

If someone would have told me 20 years ago, that the US will turn into this, I would have thought that this person must be insane.

Now it wouldn't even surprise me, if the US turns into a giant gulag in the next 10 years.

Edit: I wonder how these policemen justify their actions, after all they are going after their own people.

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Because situations like these are quite rare. Even if your best friend was on the receiving end of this tyranny, you still have all the food you can eat in your belly and one of the highest standards of living in history. Plus the whole system has emerged such that it appears that individuals are making free rational choices, so you have to squint very hard to see that they're ultimately being played by the house.

I've long thought that income taxes and the money printing press are a pretty juicy targets. If we could enable people to easily stop paying their "federal" taxes, they would do so out of pure self interest, even if they personally enjoyed viewing the war and oppression porn on their TV. Likewise if we could enable people to default on their unsecured debt consequence-free.

Then bitcoin happened - a perfect vaccine for the lethargic state. What could be better than a currency that looks anonymous at the start, yet will be so easy to control when the apparatus of government/finance finally catches up? And despite the burgeoning alt-coin scene, there can only ever be one reserve currency, and its properties will be the ones you can take as universal - interoperable coins merely create little enclaves that will have the screws repeatedly tightened on them. But even independent freedom-minded people don't bother actually examining the properties of the systems they enthusiastically adopt. So, there went that avenue.

These days, I have no fucking idea. Leaving and leading a peaceful life seems prudent, yet that requires consenting hard to whichever new government one explicitly chooses. And if you don't want to be in an effective satellite of USG, then China and Russia are really the only options. And really the only thing differentiating them from USG is a current lack of global power...

Because resistance is futile. The machinery of government explicitly favours authority and that very authority was given to them willingly by the voting - or non voting - masses. It is the authority that everyone, including the plundered, believe they must have in order to keep them safe. Resistance takes courage and a willingness to lose everything you care about, such as your prideful opinion, free time or an hour of your attention.

The sacrifice is too great for the overwhelming majority of the populace comfortable with what they have and a chronic aversion to all things unpleasant. I've lost count of how many people I've seen change the channel when news of war or police brutality come on.

When the effort needed to change government matches that of a retweet, we will see change.

When the effort needed to change government matches that of a retweet, we're all screwed. People should take at least a little time to make a considered decision about where the government is headed.

Some things are dangerous when they become too easy. Like obtaining a driver's license, or purchasing a gun.

The non-voting gave no such authority. They decided that being able to choose whether the assholes had red or blue hats wasn't even worth ten minutes of their time, and opted to not take part in the farce.

On the other hand, the voting (even if they voted Libertarian/Paul) supported the election system itself, and signaled their agreement to be ruled by the inevitable outcome.

>> Why doesn't your society resist?

> Because resistance is futile.

Resistance is not futile. We are far bigger and stronger than they are. An organized and determined resistance could dismantle the police state.

But the vast majority of the population is uneducated, uninformed and unmotivated. They're unwilling to turn off TV and talk radio and participate in their community.

And the few who are educated, informed and motivated get discouraged when nobody joins them in their protests, when they're alone in speaking out.

Maybe it needs to get even worse before a critical mass of resistance will set aside their trivial distractions and organize themselves.

I appreciate what you're saying, but that just goes to show how large the barrier is to entry in governance. I fear you may be right that it may need to get worse before that resistance gains momentum. Which saddens me even more as I don't want to see any more lives destroyed.

> But the vast majority of the population is uneducated, uninformed and unmotivated. They're unwilling to turn off TV and talk radio and participate in their community.

That was always the case in past centuries (more so) and still, people frequently rebelled against malevolent authorities.

Have we become too civilized to resist? Or are we just too concerned with our individual well-being to sacrifice some personal safety for a common cause?

Policemen likely don't think of themselves as "going after their own people." They think of themselves as going after criminals, often times profiled based on race (e.g. the anecdote from the article about stopping a Mexican wearing a U of Wyoming hat).

And being a police officer probably conditions you pretty quickly to assume that everyone is a bad person. When you do deal with lots of criminals every day you start to assume the worst about everyone you come in contact with.

See e.g. the Zimbardo Prison Experiment for reference on the psychological effects of arbitrary authority: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment.

Except that the SPE/ZPE was critically flawed: http://digest.bps.org.uk/2014/07/what-textbooks-dont-tell-yo...

This will stop immediately as soon as they start going after white, wealthy people. As long as they stick to poor non-white people who can't afford a lawyer or simply don't have the legal knowledge to fight back, nothing will happen.

We're still fighting for jobs under the illusion that we can become middle class.

We've lost some historical context. Take a look at how the police operated 150 years ago. The corruption now pales to then. Not that it makes any of this right, but it's neither unprecidented and certainly not the worst it's ever been.

I think you answered your own questions. Abuse of power isn't separate from a rational threat.

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