Read up on “qualified immunity.”
My only slightly exaggerated take is that police on duty can do whatever they want to whomever they want - up to and including killing someone - and not be held liable.
622 karma · joined November 7, 2017
My only slightly exaggerated take is that police on duty can do whatever they want to whomever they want - up to and including killing someone - and not be held liable.
And, yes, it was absolutely inspired by Randall Munroe’s xkcd Map of the Internet, which someone has already linked.
There’s a fork that uses ColorBrewer palettes, which may be what they actually used: https://github.com/hrbrmstr/ipv4-heatmap
(I used to work at Akamai and used this to produce monthly versions with each /24 colored based upon how many addresses within it had connected to the company’s network.)
Since the 1960's there have been tremendous advances in safety for people INSIDE of automobiles, but the safety of people outside of automobiles continues to be largely ignored.
There is a kind of arms race underway toward larger and heavier vehicles, which are far more deadly than small cars.
We have inherited so many tragedies from our grandparents' generation - the dominance of the car is on spar with nuclear weapons in the threat it poses to humanity.
I love this project, but for folks who use MacOS and want something that simply works, I can't recommend Airfoil highly enough.
"Depression" and "Schizophrenia" as diagnostic categories are fraught, as they include many subtypes and, in the latter case, may lump together multiple distinct conditions.
At best, this "AI diagnosis" research can claim that the "diagnosis" the system produced matches the "diagnosis" a panel of human psychiatrists reached for the same subject. Like most AI research, the training set and the biases and assumptions it contains are the real challenge.
AI Ethics are not yet standard practice in most institutional settings, and it shows.
Also recommended: the long documentary by Marcel Ophuls, "The Sorrow and the Pity," about ordinary French and German people who lived through WW II.
In any case, we've seen videos where police will literally fire their weapons into a car that tries to drive away from them. I guess this car got lucky today.
It's an imperfect analogy, but I think dollars are more like inches - useful to measure and compare things, and subject to redefinition at the whims of power. (Imagine a carpenter telling you he can't finish building your bookcase because he's "run out of inches." They are not the things they measure.)
The greatest triumph of the American system of doctrinal management has been the inculcation of the bedrock belief that "we live in a free society." We do not, and we never have. It remains a worthy goal; many of those fighting to realize it remain criminalized, ostracized, and imprisoned.
Would a "free" country jail its citizens at a rate FIVE TIMES HIGHER than the other countries of the world?
Would a "free" country maintain police forces in every major city that are larger and more well-equipped than most national armies worldwide?
If one were so inclined, one might wonder how these tendencies manifest in one's professional, social, and personal spheres.
Or one might argued about the advantages of higher-bandwidth system RAM vs faster SSD's… or vi vs emacs…
You may also be aware that Israel invaded territory in 1967 which it continues to occupy in flagrant violation of "international law," and that this occupation continues to be violently resisted.
Those are a few of the more salient reasons why Israel is a hotbed of military/cyber/border/security technology. It's all developed, tested, and deployed against a vulnerable occupied population, then sold to the "friendly" (ahem) nations of the world.
"Can we already grasp the rough outlines of these coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being 'motivated'; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve…"
(Note on the above off-repeated cliche: they did not, in fact, make the trains run on time.)
The readers of HN would do well to think long and carefully about the ideas herein. The fate of our world may depend upon it.
I am by no means a counterinsurgency or intelligence analysis expert, but I do have training in the social sciences and several decades of work in environments where I, shall we say, have encountered military thinking and doctrine.
This article to me reads as two academics insisting that THEIR social sciences disciplines are ESSENTIAL to forecasting information that western militaries desperately want to know. But, although the article repeatedly refers to their custom system ("Weber," named after the founder of sociology, not the fine outdoor grill), they never actually manage to describe the workings of the system at all; they simply narrate a variety of "scenarios," and cherry pick three instances where they claim their predictions (not previously available) were relevant or accurate.
The authors say "Weber" makes use of "53 ad-hoc parameters," and continue, "We made use of System Engineering that led us to a systemic approach." Aha, well, that certainly explains it! Continuing directly: "At that time thanks to this tooled method we took a major step toward a reflexive way of reasoning. As a result, this innovative and challenging method allowed us to achieve 23 meta-scenarios, comprising 58 sub-cases of scenarios described through visualization tools. Moreover, Weber enabled us to describe 138 different behavior patterns among the Jihadist Actors."
I've read the entire paper, and this is the closest they ever get to actually describing how their supposedly novel, "tooled system" operates.
The outputs they discuss later in the paper are actually mordantly amusing, in a Kurt Vonnegut sort of way. Take, for example, these keen insights (keeping in mind the research was conducted in 2016):
"Everywhere in the World, and especially in Africa, Al-Qaeda (AQ) began ten years ago to adopt a new tactic: “landfilling” within the societies where they were, with a long-range aim. By marriages facilitated by polygamy - a natural way to set up political alliances by blood - AQ militants established strong ties with tribes and they kept a low profile with lesser recourse to violence from that time on. Then, in some areas - for instance in coastal Libya - as early as January 2012 (through “Ansar al-Charia”) and in Syria (creation of “Jabhat al Nusra li-Ahl ash-Sham”), and in Northern Mali in January 2013 (co-rebellion of Jihadists and Tuaregs) the AQ local entities arose suddenly."
Apparently their sophisticated sociocultural analytical tooled system missed what is obviously the key reason that "AQ local entities arose suddenly" in Libya (January 2012) and northern Mali (January 2013) – I refer, of course, to the NATO bombing of Libya, the killing of Qaddafi, the complete destruction of much of Libya's state infrastructure, and the consequent dispersal of Libya's considerable arsenal to smaller, independent groups. The authors' claim that "Al-Qaeda" was pursuing a strategic, ten-year-long tactic of "landfilling" appears to be a convenient and paranoid way to describe the natural movements of younger men. How convenient that they happened to "landfill" in Libya ten years before a brutal NATO bombing campaign destroyed the central government and scattered the remaining security forces into disparate bands warring for power!
This is some kindergarten-level scholarship, which makes it exactly appropriate for NATO's forward-looking intelligence assessments, which are seldom more than gruesome fantasies for generals to whisper into the ears of their civilian overseers to secure ever-more funding for the world-destroying systems of ever-greater armaments.
There are some excellent resources out there - some useful keywords to search would be "Pinkertons" and "Ludlow"…
It's useful to recognize that police primarily exist to defend private property and the persons to whom said property belongs.