Post US Civil war, we encoded a set of rules that on their face did not discriminate on race. But their effect was basically to prevent black people from voting and enjoying their civil liberties.
Now we are encoding these biases into models built with mass surveillance. Many of us upper middle class white folks turn a blind eye. Subconsciously we know that’s not really targeting us. “We have nothing to hide” is the battle cry of the apathetic middle class person... when you trace the origin not just to law and order but the “war on terrorism” the relationship to race is even more depressing.
Maybe when we examine deeper we see those using the tools of mass surveillance look like us (heck are from this industry!). This same people working in the surveillance industry only imagine getting the “bad guys” not people that look like them!
On their face this has nothing to do with race. Examine deeper and you see, it’s far easier to take away civil liberties when it’s the “other” it’s being taken away from. Where the in group can blissfully rationalize what’s happening to get on with their day
Do you feel the same is true about surveillance used on January 20, 2020 in Richmond, VA (2nd amendment protestors)? The one that a state of emergency was declared for it in advance of the event.
Indeed it is! However, in the case of the Richmond, VA rally there was no violence. And the people that participated in the rally did so in accordance with the law.
People in Minneapolis are throwing rocks and setting buildings on fire. That seems a lot more worse than people holding (but not threatening to use) weapons.
Who are you more afraid of - a dude holding a rock they might throw or a dude holding a gun that he could possibly fire?
Yeah, the gun. It is more likely to hurt you. It doesn't matter if folks are threatening to use it or not. The gun can, in general, do more bodily harm. Just because folks didn't use them doesn't mean it isn't a threat. Rocks at least have more purpose than to put holes in things - guns are there to kill other things even when used responsibly. Gun ranges are simply training for this.
I don't believe it is that rational. It's an ideological assessment, not a risk assessment.
If you agree with the people holding the guns, you feel safer with them. If you agree with the people holding the rock, you feel safer with them. It doesn't matter what they are holding.
Broken_Hippo says>"Rocks at least have more purpose than to put holes in things - guns are there to kill other things even when used responsibly. "
- Broken Hippo apparently hasn't been hit by a rock recently!8-) I joke, but...
We're speaking of men holding rocks. You underestimate the effectiveness of rocks as weapons. Every man knows how to use a rock as a weapon and almost everyone has thrown a rock or pounded something with a rock. You needn't throw a rock to kill/harm someone; it's likely faster and easier if you keep the rock in your hand.
Rocks have been used as weapons since before prehistoric times. Rocks have possibly been instruments of death for more of our ancestors than have bullets.
Were the same or similar tools used in Richmond? I can't find any coverage of that specifically.
I mean, I'm sure someone had a CCTV turned on the guys, but surely you'd agree that the Richmond protest was less surveilled and less attended by law enforcement. Broadly, I think the fact that 2A protests tend to be met with gentle indifference by law enforcement instead of the mass surveillance and control techniques used against civil rights folks rather reinforces the upthread point, no?
2A attendees who are carrying firearms are usually licensed, which means they aren't felons and have clean background records. In most states training and licensing is required to carry short firearms (pistols, revolvers). Licensed firearms owners are an unusually safe and cautious group of people.
I wouldn't say that many in VA are licensed, because in VA (and many other states), you don't need a license to purchase or carry firearms. Most states don't require any sort of training to buy a firearm. And every single state requires a background check for any firearm sold by a dealer, (thus the infamous "gun show loophole"), this is a federal law.
Concealed carry does require a license (and sometimes a "training" class, which is laughable at best. (Seriously, I have never known anyone fail this class in my state. A driving license test probably has a 100 times higher failure rate.). And of course, as we are talking about a pro gun rally, carrying concealed defeats the purpose.
I'm a 2nd amendment proponent, but I've been in too many public gun ranges, too many gun shows, and been around too many idiot gun owners to think that the firearms training the vast majority of states (maybe every state?) has or provides is nearly enough. Owning a firearm in this country solely amounts too: have you yet been convicted of a felony or smoked weed?
What about the three guys arrested prior to that very 2A protest in Richmond? What about the nuts in Malheur? Hell, the second worst terrorist attack in the history of the country was carried out by an avowed gun rights advocate (though not, of course, with a gun).
I think if you go look this up, you'll find that these people are not, in fact, particularly peaceful as protestors go. They're simply ignored by the police in ways that the dreadlocked hippies are not.
(I mean, sure, those are all exceptions. But then most of the people in Minneapolis weren't burning anything down either. Have you ever been to a left-wing march? This isn't a demographic known for temper.)
I think to an extent, that was his point. When laws like this are enacted, they are targeted at a perceived enemy or class. And yet inevitably they are turned elsewhere, finally targeting everyone.
I personally feel the same is true for those protesters as well. We all have the right to protest for Constitutional rights and the right to do so free of invasive surveillance measures. As far as I know the VA protesters were not Nazis or other individuals with violent ideologies, they were just normal gun owners.
Most of the MPLS protesters are also normal people fed up with the lack of attention given to the plight of minorities and the poor in the United States. So yeah, no false equivalence/hypocrisy here from me.
I think you'll find that a substantial portion of those of us who are opposed to police surveillance are also opposed to the mandatory use of contact tracing apps, especially ones designed by some of the least trustworthy surveillance companies in existence (Google, palantir, etc).
Example is a representative in the sate of WA, Matt Shea; He'd like to know who doesn't pass his fealty tests:
"The document, consisting of 14 sections divided into bullet points, had a section on "rules of war" that stated "make an offer of peace before declaring war", which within stated that the enemy must "surrender on terms" of no abortions, no same-sex marriage, no communism and "must obey Biblical law", then continued: "If they do not yield — kill all males"." [0]
> Post US Civil war, we encoded a set of rules that on their face did not discriminate on race. But their effect was basically to prevent black people from voting and enjoying their civil liberties.
The laws about voting (poll taxes, grandfather clauses) did claim to not be about race to pass muster regarding the 15th amendment, but the same is not true of laws concerning exercise of other civil liberties. The bulk of Jim Crow laws were quite explicitly discriminating on race.
Though the “separate for equal” doctrine rationalized the protection of black civil rights. We have a long history of putting a fig leaf over racial power dynamics.
> we encoded a set of rules that on their face did not discriminate on race. But their effect was basically to prevent black people from voting and enjoying their civil liberties.
That is quite a claim. I am neither agreeing or disagreeing, as I don't know enough about this. Could you share some specific examples of the rules that you are referring to and evidence that they were intended to prevent black people from voting and enjoying their civil liberties?
redlining wasn't a law (it is illegal now), but it really supercharged these sorts of things by putting all of the PoC in very specific areas that were always depressed away from all of the white folk.
Laws are passed by Congress, policies are created by the executive to define things left unspecified by law, pursuant to broader powers granted by Congress.
Policies that aren't laws carry the same effective force of law, but they can be changed on a whim by the president with an executive order.
The Federal Home Loan Bank Act established the agencies that would create redlining, but the redlining itself was created by the administrators and independent agencies created by the act.
and republicans are still trying to subvert it by sneaking in restitution as a prerequisite. it was challenged in the courts, overturned, and now appealed
You're not explaining the other side of the story.
Many felons are convicted and owe fees to their victims, or to the govt. If you commit a violent crime, or a financial crime, there can be a financial penalty. Many of the felons that want to vote, never paid back their victims, or the state, for the crimes they were committed.
The Florida proposition "restored the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation"
Now, they want to vote, but still haven't compensated their victims, which was a part of the sentence, based on a lawful conviction.
I still don’t understand why we deny felons the right to vote while they are serving their sentence, so extending this to nonpayment of fines seems even more arbitrary.
In the UK people in jail (so a subset of convicted people) are not allowed to vote. The argument is that while you are detained in jail you are being punished by loss of civil rights and that voting is one of these.
One obvious answer is that we've found them to be problematic with regards to living peacefully with other people, so much so that we feel the need to physically remove them so they cannot hurt others. Why would we allow them to vote under those circumstances?
There's the idea that, felons have opted out of civilized intercourse. You can't do that, then pick and choose which rights you want to keep. After you've deliberately violated rights of others.
In the past, felons were transported. It was cruel and caused unspeakable suffering. Kind of like what the felons did. So a balance of a sort.
I've got the strange feeling that Mars may not be the rich person's paradise folks joke about. It may be a prison colony. The rigors of the trip (permanent physical impairment) may preclude soft rich people from applying for the trip.
Anyway, to return to the topic, if I were officiating a baseball game and somebody came out on the field and broke the bat, pried up the bases and tossed the ball over the fence, I'd evict them from the park. It's only sensible. They can't obey the rules, they're out. Otherwise the game is completely disrupted.
> There's the idea that, felons have opted out of civilized intercourse.
Not all felons, though. Only the ones we choose to surveill and prosecute. So coke-sniffing bankers tend never to be caught. But 19 year old poor hispanic kids with weed in their pockets end up in jail on a three strikes violation because the police stop them all the time just for standing on the street.
> if I were officiating a baseball game
Now extend this analogy appropriately: what if the RULES of the baseball game were only written by the winning team? And that team made it so they were allowed to do this stuff without penalty? So they always win.
And the loser team can't fix that. Because to change the rules to make them fair they have to win, and they can't. Because of the rules.
That's how this works in reality: the point to disenfranchising felons isn't to punish them, it's to keep them from voting for the party whose policies might make them less likely to be felons.
Where is this “idea that felons have opted out of civilized intercourse”? Spaghetti Westerns? North Korea? It certainly isn’t an idea aligned with American values.
Imprisonment is meant for rehabilitation in addition to punishment. There’s the idea, at least in theory, that people who commit crimes can eventually be functional members of society with full rights given a second chance. So we send people to prison and then let them resume their lives as citizens afterwards. If they owe money due to a civil suit they can still vote because why wouldn’t they? Franchise isn’t tied to financial means and shouldn’t be.
> Imprisonment is meant for rehabilitation in addition to punishment.
Don't forget the third big part: stopping them from violating the rights of others.
They do temporarily lose some rights, they do (and should) get them back when their "debt to society" is paid (which I find a slightly weird term, but whatever), why shouldn't the right to vote be one of the rights that you get back when you're rehabilitated and reintroduced into society, just like your right to freely move about?
What the fuck is it with this site and shitty, specious analogies?
Society is not a game or stadium. There is no outside.
Justice is imperfect.
Laws are not all as obvious as 'breaking the bat'.
Now, responding to the part of your comment that isn't the shitty, specious analogy. You beg the question, saying that felons don't get to vote because they've opted out of civilized intercourse. You don't bother to argue the antecedent, you just assume it. That doesn't address the question being asked in the thread, it just affirms the way things are.
What does that have anything to do with whether someone ought to have representation in the very government that created and enforces the laws they were found to have violated?
You haven't actually presented another side to the story, you've just cited a legitimate, but completely irrelevant, concern.
If people aren't paying their debts, garnish their wages, seize their assets, or if they're flagrantly avoiding paying back debts, put them back in jail--you know, normal things that we already do which actually get people to pay back their debts. Failure to pay reparations is a legitimate concern, but it's not relevant to voting rights.
Let's not pretend this is about reparations. It's about disfranchising people.
The state doesn't know how much they owe because they weren't all that concerned before. Also, the Florida DOC has a nasty habit of inventing fines and fees.
According to you it should be simple. Whatever the sentencing judge has put in the sentence is the sentence. But that has proven not to be the case. The governor wants the DOC to find any and all unpaid fines and fees. And they want to be allowed years to resolve it.
The judge looked at the excuses the DOCs counsel was offering and quickly swatted it down. An ex-convict that has satisfied the terms of his sentence as it is written on the sentencing docket has no reason not to have their rights restored.
False. I'm drawing attention to the amendment and what the will of the people was/is and efforts made to subvert that will. The amendment as on the ballot said nothing about requiring money as a prerequisite. That's what Florida voted for: returning freed felons their rights. To ascribe some other interpretation to "terms" is to subvert the will of the people of Florida.
Ultimately the courts will decide whether the legal language "terms" includes fines and restitution. Seeing as these felons are free and fines are a civil matter I don't know how the courts could find that such things are part of their criminal sentence.
Edit: also btw I linked to reputable sources. I didn't obscure anything or omit anything.
It's right there on wiki:
>However, by mid-2019 Republican Governor DeSantis signed a bill into law which originated in the Florida Senate, SB 7066, which required that "people with felony records pay 'all fines and fees' associated with their sentence prior to the restoration of their voting rights"
It's a post facto qualifier. If fines were implied by the initial amendment this bill would be unnecessary.
Indeed. Really, felons currently serving their sentence should be able to vote. It's your only protection against the government throwing its political opponents in prison.
If we had a magical, objective, 100% accurate way of determining whether judgments are fair and punishments are appropriate, then maybe it would make sense to suspend the voting rights of criminals. But we don't, and the only check on whether the criminal justice system is doing the right thing is the popular ballot. Allowing the criminal justice system to disenfranchise people is an obvious loophole.
Besides, what are we worried about? That criminals would vote to legalize their own crimes? If more than half the population are criminals, it's not clear that any sort of government is going to work at all....
No it does not. The second amendment offers no realistic protection for a civilian in any sort of way.
I have been part of a special forces raid to capture or kill and I can tell you the opponent has no realistic way to win that day. Sure you can win in the long run if you are fighting at home with the enemy fighting far away from theirs but not they you will suffer heavy losses and live in a condition far from what most of us can imagine or are prepared to do.
Suppose a small town in rural US decides to refuse carrying out whatever order or restriction coming down from the federal government. Population ~5,000, they have guns and ammo.
What exactly would you, special forces or the government be able to do, to force them to comply with whatever order it is you are trying to impose?
I do believe in the self-determination of communities. It's fine to have some sort of government at the federal or supra-national level but it should be restricted and unanimous (i.e. a libertarian, "nightwatchman state").
It doesn't feel right that higher levels can interfere in lower levels in matters that does not affect them. We're seeing this right now in the EU, with various states trying to have their ideas promoted at the level of the EU as a whole, i.e. other nations, which clearly doesn't work because people have different cultures, traditions, etc. That's one of the reasons why Britain left.
The blast radius of a modern nuclear warhead is big enough to encompass many cities of population ~5000. Or if obeying international law is a concern, carpet-bombing would be pretty effective.
The idea that people with handheld guns are going to take on a government with nuclear capabilities is an absurd fantasy.
I'm a supporter of the second amendment. There is plenty of justification for supporting the second amendment without entertaining absurd fantasy scenarios.
They will quickly learn that their fantasy of rugged individual resistance can be quickly quashed if the government is willing to have civilian casualties. And spoiler, it clearly is, we just saw a guy casually suffocate a guy in broad daylight and there were no consequences until public outcry was so bad they caved and have fired them and started with token charges that will likely not stick based on historical evidence of prior examples.
Being "encouraging" by ignoring reality isn't particularly useful.
There are plenty of reasons to own firearms which have nothing to do with defending yourself against the government. When seconds count, the police are minutes away.
You defend your rights by being part of a tribe willing to defend you. One person with a gun is useless against more than one person with a gun. And even one on one, the odds aren’t good.
The law conditions votes on fines or fees related to their sentence. There is no system for actually determining what’s owed, so some felons who could vote may not register for fear of committing another crime.
Now that you’re aware of this issue, I’m certain that you agree that conditioning voting on fines and fees related to a sentence is wrong.
The parent is referring (not that accurately) to the variety of laws known as Jim Crow[1]. It's remarkable that these aren't widely if not universally known today. They were effectively eliminated by the Voting Rights Act[2].
Note, that Jim Crow was enacted not immediately after the Civil War but after the reconstruction period[3]. The aftermath of reconstruction involved a period of racist terror where the Ku Klux Klan and other forces effectively engaged in a guerilla campaign that restored white supremacy in the South.
It's also important to mention the Black Codes[1], which were, effectively, a reimplementation of slavery that just didn't use the word "slave".
Many of these laws existed before the Civil War, and were simply "updated" to replace the word "slave" with "freedman".
Other laws cleverly redefined common terms, introducing technical language, so that they could claim that a former slave, forced to work for little or no pay, was "serving an apprenticeship" or "being punished for vagrancy". E.g., a slave in reality, but "on paper" an apprentice, a volunteer, serving a criminal sentence, etc.
Black Codes also severely limited the ability of black citizens to gather and organize, required impossible "literacy tests" to vote, and prevented black citizens from owning any type of weapon, either outright:
Louisiana: "No freedman shall be allowed to carry firearms, or any kind of weapons."
Or via a "may issue" licensing scheme:
Alabama: "Freedmen must not carry knives or firearms unless they were licensed so to do."
>They were effectively eliminated by the Voting Rights Act
Except that key provisions of the act were struck down in 2013. Those provisions prevented states with a history of disenfranchisement from changing their voting laws. Since the court ruling several of these states have started back on the path of disenfranchisement.
Assuming charitably for a moment that you're posting in good faith: if you're wondering why you're being downvoted, it's likely because these laws, their effects, and exceedingly strong evidence of racist intent behind them are all easily verifiable matters of historical fact.
(See, for instance, Jim Crow laws, redlining policies, poll taxes, etc. as many other commenters have already pointed to.)
That Wikipedia article has a lot of detail in it that explains things well beyond what I could within an HN comment, but I think one example is "separate but equal" which was anything but equal.
I don't know specifically which rules the parent is referring to--their phrasing ("Post US Civil war, we encoded a set of rules") makes it sound like it is referring to the US as a whole, but I'm not sure if that is their intent. Some rules at the state level, before they were forbidden by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, included poll taxes and literacy tests. This is also where the term "grandfather clause" originates, as people whose grandfathers could vote (i.e. whites) were sometimes exempted from these requirements.
> evidence that they were intended
I will say that evidence of intent is not necessary or relevant to the claim. Subjectivity in the application and execution of the voting process--for instance, where to place polling stations--can end up disadvantaging minorities due to implicit/unconscious bias in administrators, even unintentionally.
What do you think share cropping and Jim crow laws were? What do you think the several civil rights acts following the 14th amendment were addressing? What do you think separate but equal and then desegregation was? Why is it that there's always someone asking for "proof" of racism? Anyone with a high school diploma knows about these things and yet all of that well known history is insufficient proof.
edit: we rightfully so recognize people demanding proof of the holocaust as bad actors. why not with this?
Because the people demanding proof are generally sympathetic to with whatever they are acting like didn't happen. In the US we don't ask for "proof" on the Holocaust, but we do have Holocaust deniers which is similar in the sense that it seeks to dismiss any claims of harm or violence.
Here's a concrete example from about a month ago: sanitation workers in New Orleans went on strike, so the state ordered prisoners to pick up trash instead. Quite convenient to have a bunch of laborers that you can order around. https://www.wdsu.com/article/livingston-work-release-inmates...
Your "concrete example" doesn't say that any prisoners were forced to do anything. Many volunteer for work release to make money, get outside, and/or gain work experience.
If you have firsthand knowledge of any of these individuals being forced to work in this effort, by all means share it.
And the Democratic party of today is not the democratic party of yesteryear. Ignoring the fact that the parties have changed their stance on things since then makes the comment seriously fraught with errors and misleading at best.
Republicans, after defeating the South and ending slavery entered a state of moral exhaustion in the 1870s and 1880s. Tired of constantly fighting battles for other's civil rights...
After the Grant administration, Republican presidents focused a lot more on business and the wealthy northeast. They turned a blind eye to Democrat shenanigans
So frankly we're all culpable whether through direct action or choosing to ignore the problem
Yes it was, and that was shameful and wrong. It was also a century and a half ago. Sixty years back or so, the Democratic party literally split in half over exactly this issue, with the Dixiecrat demographic leaving to find its own path (I'll let you guess where).
The party of modern civil rights legislation is absolutely the democrats. People who want to talk about antebellum history instead of actual policy choices are just trying to obscure the truth instead of discuss it.
I'm curious what the response would be if someone started advertising up there that they wanted all available protestor-shot high definition footage that showed police officers' faces (particularly when a nametag or readable badge number was also visible) for the stated purpose of training a facial recognition system.
Somehow I think it would be roundly condemned by every law enforcement agency with any presence or interest in the area.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease - contact your representatives. If you contact them about an issue enough they’ll actually get in touch and ask for your input when the issue finally starts getting traction.
I think it goes without saying but they’re far more likely to listen if you’re polite and suggest possible solutions instead of just complaining.
Then we have to figure out how to use whatever power we have within this corrupt system to decorrupt it.
The "fun" answer, to burn the system down, does not leave a better system in its place. The individual components are left to scramble to develop their own systems, which in the absence of strong moral leadership, are inevitably just as as corrupt as the larger system they came from.
Are you aware of any noteworthy initiatives underway to decorrupt the system though? I often read that this is "just" all we have to do, but who's going to do it? "The System"? Democracy? AI? Rationalism? Religion? Our moms?
Limit the power of the state? Create incentives and tight feedback loops where the government has to act in the interest of all the people not the just the elites/itself?
You can't by the conventional means i.e. by voting. The military intelligence industry complex has evolved into something that ordinary people don't understand and ordinary officials can't control. It's already too late to vote them away.
The arguments for and against are both pretty valid.
On one hand children raised with positive values and a sense of moral duty to their fellow humans may be able to shift or counterbalance the direction the future is taking, but on the other, we could be leaving them to fend off with in a pretty shitty world that may have already peaked.
Pretty arguable of course, but still something worth pondering I think.
Of course I am and so are you. But I live in Europe and I dont really worry about getting killed by the police nor do I have to watch out for drones or the army getting deployed when I protest against the discrimination of entire groups of people. We have closet racists but they rarely murder people while dressed as police officers.
No, sorry, what I was trying to say is the future generations are going to wonder why we didn't add all these protections in long before we did. The world was a wild west!
( of course, they'll never understand that things weren't actually dangerous in general and that they've lost tons and tons and tons of freedoms )
I would hope that our great-grandchildren would despise us for the violence that we are inflicting on predominantly black and brown bodies, but that may be a little over-optimistic.
The short answer is systemic racism, but it seems that the practical examples of police overreach concern techies less than theoretical concerns about police overreach through surveillance.
I click on your link and the video looks suspicious, but I also have no clue who made it or who all those people are. Rex Chapman has a checkmark next to his name, but so do plenty of vacuous trolls. Inserting violent actors seems like a good way to discredit a protest, but "makes sense" isn't evidence.
So I typically end up just waiting a week or two for ostensibly fact-checked coverage and being out of the loop because there's so much uncertainty around developing events. But it feels like choosing feckless over reckless, so it's not a totally satisfying route.
I don't know, the masks may have increased police fear, or served to dehumanize the appearance of the protesters, and contributed to the use of tear gas and rubber bullets in one of the protests.
Sure, but I'm talking about probabilities of using them: The chance of surveillance of protesters ticking over into fear, and the lack of visible human faces making it even less personal. My guess is that if every protest nationwide for any issue at all began always wearing masks, with no other change in behavior, use of force against them would increase.
The factors are multiple in nature with the virus around; masking itself is not directly causal(after all, Asian countries have accepted it for decades), but there are certain other things that the virus did that make This Time Different:
1. Lots of people staying at home.
2. Lots of people out of work.
3. A challenge to the authority of the police to conduct society(the virus is more threatening than they are, and populations are resisting the return to business as usual narratives)
4. A lack of targets for police harassment to "let loose on" (because nobody is out and about)
These factors all build up to make a tinderbox where the officers who are looking for trouble(and they are always present and hungry for action) go out of their way to stir it up through provacateur tactics, and the population responds with quite a lot more force than usual since they are out of work and stuck at home and have nothing else to do. And it only escalates from there, because, again, you have police officers that are really dead set on the idea of "go get 'em", and see this as a role-playing opportunity. I should discuss the role-play in some more detail.
In the decades of collective memory, protests served as media flashpoints where the action is molded to the narrative. Everyone involved does a little bit of role-play, gets their fill of the narrative they want to see, and then goes home, with a few arrests and a bit of violence along the way, and a media product is subsequently served on the news afterwards, shaped to fit the tastes of the audience. Career activists would develop personal brands around the appropriation of protest groups towards news narrative, and the police were eager to play along and be the "other side". This dynamic of protest-as-product made protests seem unable to address legitimate concerns, since neither group was "going for the throat", as it may.
The dynamic has gradually shifted, at first slowly with protests like '99 Seattle WTO, and then faster as you get into the 2010's and live streaming takes off; coverage is getting much closer and more personal, and this runs in tandem with the rise of surveillance and police militarization creating pervasive cynicism about large institutions of all kinds. Branding of all kinds - from CNN to the blue check mark Twitter account - is mistrusted. Direct action is increasingly tolerated by the population, who can now easily hear the case for such without an intermediary. The virus has accelerated those trends, and so there's a sense of nobody holding back anymore.
Which, of course, makes it easier for the police to dehumanize the protestors.
Five to ten years ago (I really forget exactly when) I had my car towed from the street in front of my house in Minneapolis because I had forgotten to pay a few parking tickets – something which only could have happened with either an extremely bored officer manually entering license plate numbers to check... or with an automatic reader which searched every plate it saw.
Out of curiosity, how does on forget to pay several parking tickets?
Normally, I'm a very forgetful person, but letting debt pile up is something I never allow myself to forget.
When I lived in Germany everyone paid their parking tickets religiously. In the UK you'd also have your car towed away until you paid your tickets with interest plus the storage and towing fee.
There was a period where I was ticketed rather frequently for various reasons centering around having an overwhelmed schedule and needing to drive to parking constrained areas with lots of meters and complex rules. A few had been lost or forgotten. It would have probably used many fewer public resources if I had been sent a letter instead of a tow truck.
I found a parking ticket blowing down the street. I'm sure whoever owns it will be reminded in a timely fashion.
j/k Their license will be suspended and the fee will be treble after the expiration date. And they still won't know until they get pulled over or run a license check.
But the GP clearly knew they had multiple outstanding parking tickets. It's not like they causally didn't know.
edit/ I've been there personally and I was simply unable to afford them, it had nothing to do with forgetting. Thankfully I never had my car towed as a result.
I'm also from Minneapolis and had my car towed twice under really questionable circumstances.
My roommate got it worse though. He was towed for parking within 5 feet of driveway, yet the driveway was invisible because it had been completely covered by the 4-5 feet of snowed piled up on the side of the road.
I was towed for parking in a "driveway" in Minneapolis, except the "driveway" was a sidewalk cutout in front of what had at one point been a garage-type door in the side of a building right up against the sidewalk. Except the garage door had been bricked up so there was literally nothing anybody could do with the "driveway".
It was my secret spot to park because it was generally avoided, logically, there was no reason to prevent parking there. It worked for a while then I got towed. and "NO PARKING" was sprayed on the pavement shortly after. Sometimes you make a mark on the world.
This country disgusts me more and more everyday. It's unfathomable. All of us lucky tech workers owe our help to whats going on right now. Do NOT be silent. Get out there tonight and tomorrow. CIS, white, whatever, allies need to be on the streets this weekend, you're valued.
This is a tipping point but we need allies, especially people who know tech. There are grass roots protest organizations popping up everywhere that need serious pro bono tech help. If you work on distributed systems or production networks this stuff is stupid simple to you.
Split your work between fast & impermeable systems to our democracy.
> There are grass roots protest organizations popping up everywhere that need serious pro bono tech help. If you work on distributed systems or production networks this stuff is stupid simple to you.
how can one tap into the stream of information and find groups which need help? where can one learn more?
Stop calling me an "ally". I'm a human being. I belong to the same group you do. You can appeal to me the same way you appeal to everyone else. Thanks.
I don't agree with rioting and looting, but it is akin to the nuclear option of social unrest.
> This isn't about the savage murder of a man.
You're right, it's about much more than the murder that broke the proverbial camels back. What you're seeing is the output from the pent up rage of the growing systemic racial and socioeconomic inequalities that permeate this country. When people feel permanently trapped and abused, eventually they will snap. History it littered with similar examples.
Right, that's the point. People are acting in a blind rage - an understandable one, certainly, but still not one that's calculated to create effective change. Allies who truly care about the cause should be working on solving the underlying problems, not fanning the flames.
Those allies weren't around at the lie downs, the town hall meetings, the marches, the press conferences, etc. But you burn down a Target and supposed allies want to have a talk about solving underlying problems. The problem is the repressive, abusive police. When the allies have an answer to that then we can call it solved.
I think most people have been getting much, much more sympathetic to the police as the week goes on. Like, American police are abusive and terrible, but I'm forced to regrettably side with them over the people who are burning down cities.
"Looting is a howl of rage that surfaces when people feel trapped by injustice and betrayed by institutions. It’s not what happens when the goal isn’t justice, it’s what happens when the goal of justice is thwarted by a society of corrupted ideals and decayed morals."
The point is not what stores that gets looted. It's that stores are being looted at all. This only happens when people feel they are not being heard and when there is no other action than rioting and creating chaos. Looting happens because of the "protection" of the chaos, but you have to look further than just seeing people stealing stuff from stores.
The issue is so much larger and the system is actively forcing the people to create chaos, because there are no other way to get the leaders to listen to them.
People have been trying to fix this problem for decades now. Still the police is murdering US citizens. Of course people are gonna get mad as hell when that still happens.
Sorry but you don't get to tell the world what it's about and what it means to the people protesting in the various ways that they do. The way to find that out is to listen to them.
So your point is that this justifies the expansion of the surveillance state? Do you consider all of the protestors responsible for looting? And should we just discount the evidence pointing to the presence of agents provocateurs?
A breakdown of law and order is an emergency situation, justifying the use of any tools in the state's pocket regardless of our normal concerns about using them. I don't want a permanent gendarmerie in the US either, but that doesn't mean I'm opposed to deploying the National Guard.
Most of the protesters do seem to be peaceful, but that just doesn't matter in Minneapolis at this point.
Seriously, "any tools"? You are commenting on an article about the use of new surveillance tools like facial recognition software that scrapes Facebook, not a discussion on whether the National Guard should be deployed.
Oh don't be naive. There were and still are plenty of protests in Europe. Maybe watch a programme or ten where the banlieues of Paris burned for days because a teenager was accidentally killed by the police. And the protests in the UK, where the reasons were many (racism, austerity, corruption).
Europeans saying, "this could never happen here," is as daft as an American saying it.
The keyword is "accidentally killed". But whatever suits your agenda for downplaying what's happening in the US.
"And the protests in the UK, where the reasons were many (racism, austerity, corruption)." - Absolutely not comparable to what is happening in the US. The UK had riots few years back and absolutely no leader issued statements that they will get shot, and hounds released on them. It was a big deal even whey they wanted to use water cannons. But hey, what do we European communists know.
You'll be downvoted to oblivion because you're turning a national tragedy into a dishonest shit-flinging contest. You can't seriously believe that racial discrimination isn't a problem in Europe.
It is, but not to the point where people are killed by the police or denied voting rights. The fact that you are trying to make things look good by saying it happens in other places too shows ignorance.
Are people here seriously upset by technology used to identify rioters? I'm glad it exists and hope it helps to remove dangerous criminals from society.
I'm noticing a dangerous pattern emerging in the left where people are siding with rioting. You know nothing about what riots do to cities. It destroys them.
This is the moment where Trump wins the re-election because of a growing movement that is sympathetic to destroying the great city of Minneapolis over criminal conduct of a police officer.
Riots don't happen over one bad police officer. It might finally boil over and explode over one situation, but the situation has been brewing for so long, that no one can even remember the start of it anymore.
The actions of a riot might be that entities within areas gets destroyed, but that's hardly the goal.
It's similar to when kids mindlessly destroy public properties in the night in smaller cities. It's not because they just like to smash stuff, but because there is nothing else to do. Rioting tends to be the last possible action you have in your pocket, until a civil war appears. When people are feeling that no one is listening to them, they try to find other ways of getting heard.
And as history has shown us time and time again, riots sometimes work. I wish people didn't have to resolve to violence, but as an outsider who been watching the police brutality in the US for as long as I can remember, it doesn't surprise me that people has had enough.
Yes, if we learn anything from history it should be that stealing TVs and sneakers from stores owned by immigrants is the solution to social deprivation.
It’s not the criminal conduct of an officer. Police brutality is a recurring pattern in these communities. It’s large injustices like murder and small ones like unjustified traffic stops and fines. It’s continual and oppressive. People are mad about it and rightfully so. There are plenty of examples peaceful protest against police brutality but nothing has changed. What can we expect? Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
Now we are encoding these biases into models built with mass surveillance. Many of us upper middle class white folks turn a blind eye. Subconsciously we know that’s not really targeting us. “We have nothing to hide” is the battle cry of the apathetic middle class person... when you trace the origin not just to law and order but the “war on terrorism” the relationship to race is even more depressing.
Maybe when we examine deeper we see those using the tools of mass surveillance look like us (heck are from this industry!). This same people working in the surveillance industry only imagine getting the “bad guys” not people that look like them!
On their face this has nothing to do with race. Examine deeper and you see, it’s far easier to take away civil liberties when it’s the “other” it’s being taken away from. Where the in group can blissfully rationalize what’s happening to get on with their day