A nation which allows itself to be willingly ruled by war criminals is, first and foremost, a victim of its own cowardice.
The American People will never be safe until they properly prosecute their war criminals. American policing organisations are riddled with very real war criminals calling the shots.
Don't be so surprised that what these people did to Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Yemen, they will do to the American people.
The 18000 law enforcement agencies in the US are overwhelmingly controlled at the local and state levels.
While a simplistic “get rid of the war criminals at the top” would be a nice solution, the reality of the problem is far scarier and more distributed than that.
The same policies and culture that allow Americans to demolish, with impunity, countless other sovereign states while proclaiming their own moral authority, are what's at stake here in the streets today.
America has been kneeling on the neck of countless other nations, which also lost their breath, for decades.
A nation which callously disregards these crimes, will eventually fall victim to the same mechanics, itself.
America is ruled by a death cult which believes only in its own superiority over all other nations on Earth. Until this changes, the American people are as safe as anyone else this very real death cult puts in its sights, which is to say: not safe at all.
For those who might not be aware, the Military is run in a very cult-like manner. The core of any cult is ritual (habit / repetition), in-group language, in-group symbolism, in-group socializing, etc. The brainwashing actually begins outside of the military for most people at a very young age, with the daily pledging of blind allegiance to a flag.
Another obvious death cult is the Skull and Bones society. These people have sayings like "might makes right" and "always ahead of the pack". They are like Hydra from the Marvel movies - their members have infiltrated every place of power and they use their positions to pull off things like 9/11. A number of US Presidents and presidential candidates have also been members of this group.
I believe the grandparent post is referring to the fact that the domestic police organizations are more-and-more frequently being populated by veterans of the US military.
LE culture of leadership is almost totally based on seniority from what I understand, the veterans of the recent wars aren’t old enough to be in positions of control.
This also doesn’t jive with the commonly held idea of armed forces members having higher standards for ROE and better training than LEOs, and introduces a pretty murky version of “war criminal”, as opposed to the usual Kissinger’s and Bush’s.
The culture of America's law enforcement is derived from the actions of its military heroes.
American LE and American military are intertwined, and the policies which are derived in one arena and moved to another have been for decades a mainstay of the means by which America's military industrial pharmaceutical complex maintains an iron grip on the nations martial resources.
Until the American people avail themselves of the truth regarding their leaders involvement in committing crimes against humanity with impunity, the American people will themselves be subject to the very same criminals' policies.
What happened to Mosul can happen to Baltimore. The very same mechanics of discrimination and hatred are at play.
Both of your posts in this thread explicitly call out leadership, but I didn't read the original comment as talking only about leadership. I think this may be the disconnect in this thread.
Today Americans feel the boot they themselves have been pressing into the necks of others for decades.
This is why the American people, if they are to turn things around and create a just society, must continue to demand justice for their own very real war criminals all the way to the top.
As long as Obama and Clinton and Bush(es) and now Trump are free to continue to propagate their death cult policies, there will not be justice in America, for Americans - or around the world, for anyone.
Americans must understand: as a nation, they have been kneeling on the necks of others for decades, and the American People are themselves complicit in the act.
Until there is real justice for this magnitude of criminal behaviour, the streets will not be safe for anyone deemed 'inferior' by the death cult.
> Today Americans feel the boot they themselves have been pressing into the necks of others for decades
The Americans who are feeling the boot now are largely the same ones that have been feeling the boot since before the US had status as a major power, uniformed police forces, or even independence.
They've gotten more sympathy from other Americans recently than they had centuries ago, which makes the anger about it more widespread, but it is certainly not a reversal where the people directing the US’s comparatively brief (even if you go back to the Monroe Doctrine) colonial empire and now feeling the boot of oppression in some kind of karmic balance.
To the extent there is a relation to any American war crimes of the last couple decades, you've got the direction of influence exactly reversed. The deep, ingrained racism and tolerance for domestic injustice in the US is the root from which the overseas abuses grows, not the other way around.
If American martial culture had not operated with such impunity in foreign theatres, it would not have made the mistake of thinking it can apply the same policies within its own borders. Complacency and complicity brought us to where we are today.
And what America feels in the last week is a form of karmic retribution for all the suffocating that the American people have, themselves, supported over the last few decades.
The victims may speak a vastly different language, but the policies that led to the boot on the neck are one and the same.
'dragonwriter is correct that USA is founded upon thoroughly colonialist principles from the beginning. Even the War of Independence was fought at least partially in reaction to England's Somerset v Stewart case in 1772. The nineteenth century in North America was a devastating slaughter of the natives from beginning to end. African Americans got a few years of hope and respite during Reconstruction, but that was preceded by centuries of slavery and followed by a century of Jim Crow. The 20th century began with exporting our racist colonialism to the Philippines, which was to be a model for American military action up to the present day. Our later atrocities in Asia and Latin America weren't anything new for us.
In short, we've been at this a lot longer than you seem to appreciate. I think you're right that today's barbarities depend on those of yesterday more directly than those of centuries ago, but they also depend on those of centuries ago. It might be that poor whites are more observant of our common interests with minorities than we used to be. We had been promised a society with more freedom and possibility than the one we have received, and our Stupid Wars have played a role in that, here and abroad. As Thucydides observed, the tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself.
My argument that something can and must be done about this, today, is of course going to be eternally defeated with the contradictory 'it has always been this way since forever' position.
The point is, there is something that can be done about it today, and it involves unity and cohesion and universality among a large group of people.
This isn't happening fast enough, because there are very real criminals standing in the way - out there in the shadows - and until the light of truth is shone on them, civil upheaval as we see, will continue.
So, the riots will be quelled, eventually, and so too the protests. Remember Occupy! And after that, a return to regular school-shootings and terrorist attacks.
> My argument that something can and must be done about this, today, is of course going to be eternally defeated with the contradictory 'it has always been this way since forever' position.
No, your argument that “fix the (recent) US overseas policy and you fix the (centuries older than the country’s independence) domestic problem since the latter is just a domestic reflection of a culture rooted in the former” will continue to be defeated by the fact that you have the relationship backwards.
Maybe you can fix the one that is the reflection automatically, or at least more easily, by focussing on fixing the one that is the historical and cultural antecedent, but if so you need to fix the domestic one to fix the foreign one, not the other way around.
> The point is, there is something that can be done about it today, and it involves unity and cohesion and universality among a large group of people.
No one is arguing against that vague platitude, but against the much more specific claim that foreign abuses the US has committed since becoming a superpower are the root of domestic abuses it has been engaging in since it was colonized by Europeans.
Ah, no actually you really do mis-construe my position - to avoid an uncomfortable truth, perhaps.
I believe the American people will forever be driven by this utterly violent, racist, intolerant turmoil, because they allow it to occur in their name behind a veil of secrecy and privilege: in the actions of their military.
Americans cowardly do not want to be shown what their military does to other 'inferior cultures', they actively invest in efforts to make sure such light of truth is never shone on their state, and when it happens within their own borders, live, on TV, in a way which cannot be denied...
America is an embarrassment to itself, since this means that its own citizens don't have a clue what the rest of the world knows about the victim count in its illegal wars.
There's a reason this victim count for the Coalitions' wars, as well as its ROE, are high secrets - and for citizens of various 5-eyes state, just knowing these secrets makes them 'criminal' in the eyes of their corrupted judiciary.
Today its the cops. Tomorrow, it should be the Generals. As two groups, they share many, many social networks. There really isn't sufficient distinction between the US Police circle, and the US Military circle for it to be of any real consequence.
And that is my real and final point: We, the people, will be forever ruled by a criminal elite for as long as we let them get away with murder.
Which is happening at the rate of, about say .. 1 innocent victim every twenty minutes for the last twenty years ..
What you say is true, but as far as I know nobody does it unless forced from outside.
Instead of American people, this is just basic humanity.
We become peaceful trough institutions, gradual development of norms etc. All this is breaking all over the world. In EU Europe Hungary and Poland are getting away from liberal democracy.
The guns in the US are largely owned by the same faction that supports and is executing the excessive police violence (and which gets a free pass for violent protest while the opposing faction is violently suppressed even when peacefully protesting); it's also the faction that has provocateurs actively creating violence around the current protest to create cover for violent “responses”.
If there is to be an alternative to the distant and aloof police state, it will have to be in the form of attentive and caring locals possessing sufficient enforcement power.
I guess it could be way more people carrying guns, but eventually the police will start treating white people with guns like they treat black people (an excuse to kill them because the felt threatened). But the probably far more likely way to change policing is getting control of police forces,firing the cops, reconstituting them with real oversight and no special immunity.
I saw an interview[1] with radio host Charlamagne tha God who seems to promote gun ownership to the black community.
It’s sad to say, but I think that might actually be a smart way to promote better gun ownership laws in the US. Using racism against itself: black people (legally, openly) wearing guns might be a good (but really dangerous) argument against any people wearing guns.
> It’s sad to say, but I think that might actually be a smart way to promote better gun ownership laws in the US. Using racism against itself: black people (legally, openly) wearing guns might be a good (but really dangerous) argument against any people wearing guns.
Or it'll just be a way for black people to get shot and killed by police, just like black people having their hands up and not reaching for an object in their pocket which police erroneously believe to be a gun apparently is.
As was pointed out in sibling comments, most of the people who are the most upset with police are unarmed.
The overlap between armed and police resistance is still small, but I hope it grows: not so that people can shoot at the police, but that so the balance of power shifts in a larger fashion and the police no longer feel safe in blatantly assaulting people, much the same way non-police feel now about attacking police with sticks and tear gas and “less lethal” projectiles.
They don’t do it because they know their counterparty can and will immediately escalate to potentially lethal force.
Counterintuitively, more arms results in more peace. The violence that is happening now results from the massive available-force imbalance. The police feel safe assaulting and murdering anyone they want, the only recourse against them being neutered by widespread co-conspirator testilying by LEOs.
The average person will need to stop trusting unsubstantiated cop testimony (feds included) before the systemic racism starts to decline.
I imagine that by the end of the year we will see lots of non-gun-owners beginning to question why all of the draconian restrictions on firearms ownership apply only to civilians and not the police.
Good police or bad police (and we know it’s the latter), that is a huge power imbalance ripe for abuse.
> Counterintuitively, more arms results in more peace.
That's controversial at best. Arguably, part of the reason the police is so aggressive and distrustful when interacting with regular people is the higher gun density in the country.
I mean, maybe if you chart violence (y axis) vs percentage of gun ownership (x axis), you get a bell curve and the US is in an awkward middle position. But that's a maybe, and, anyway, that means that both increasing and decreasing the number of weapons would reduce violence in that case.
> Arguably, part of the reason the police is so aggressive and distrustful when interacting with regular people is the higher gun density in the country.
The vast majority of police violence we witness in the US is against totally unarmed people. I think this gives the police far too much credit. Being a police officer is actually a very safe job to begin with, and violent crime in the US has been decreasing steadily for decades.
In fact, most of the worst offending police departments are the places in the US where the incidence of civilian gun ownership, legal or otherwise, is lowest: New York, Boston, Chicago, LA.
The cops simply don't need an excuse for violence, they're violent even, or perhaps because, the public they attack are unarmed.
Don't you think encouraging more gun ownership will merely encourage even more brutal police tactics in an ever accelerating downward spiral that may only end in another civil war? There has been a debate in the US the last decades about the increased militarisation of the police force, and to me the best idea seems that maybe both police and citizens should be increasingly disarmed rather than the other way around.
The police so far haven't openly fired at crowds. It is all but guaranteed that if they felt there was a real chance that the crowd was armed, they would be directly instructed to fire.
There were protests across the US just a few weeks before the current batch that were prominently heavily armed. No police violence was reported.
> The police so far haven't openly fired at crowds.
They have, however, been actively attacking, beating, arresting, and sometimes murdering people protesting peacefully.
I believe that the likelihood of all police abuses against large groups, from rubber bullets (that have fractured childrens' skulls in the last week) all the way up to the situation you describe, is significantly reduced in likelihood if they are made to fear immediate retaliation by the crowd, much the same way the crowd does not attack the police.
The police are humans too (it is claimed), so I would imagine they too, like the protestors, wish to go home at the end of their shift.
Look at it this way: every single cop in these things is armed with deadly force. There are already thousands of guns at these things, and we already know the police are violent, murderous liars, as evidenced by the thousands of cases of beatings, murders, injuries, and riots they've directly perpetrated in the last week.
The situation will not be worsened by reducing the power imbalance. If the murderous pigs can avoid shooting into crowds, I imagine the peaceful protestors will do at least as well.
People first have to believe that the cause (retribution, resistance, revolution, whatever you want to call it) is worth dying for, because the system (the cops, the media, the milquetoast white public) considers cop death to be the single worst crime and reacts with extreme vengeance and violence.
If you were to try this, they would murder every last one of you – and harass or murder your families – even if you killed 5 cops for every one of you who died. (Just imagine the ending of Les Mis.) Hard for people to believe it’s worth it when the reply by the system is so harsh.
On top of that, there are just so many officers in a given city. Killing one or two or three won’t make much of a difference but it will certainly make the rest worse overall.
They're busy crimin', or staying in prison. Guess you're referring to criminals, and not non-violent protesters. Any escalation in violence, is a lost cause.
Instead of focusing on extremists and extreme opinions, government and media should be there for every majority and minority. A partisan, is no leader of people.
Considering i've seen armies less well equipped then your police force and civilian population i think its a miracle the shooting hasn't started yet.
Y'all ever considered gun control or is that taboo? Maybe if you weren't all armed like you're going to a Texan wedding your law enforcement wouldn't have to be as well?
Even if it made sense to consider gun control in the long term, why would it make sense now? Police already struggle with the tasks they've been assigned: "Fight stupid Drug War and don't brutalize innocents? Does not compute!" Why give them another impossible task that would set them at odds with another group of citizens? It might be good for Americans in the long run, because we'd all see our real enemies clearly for the first time. (I.e., now that police are attacking 90% of the nation, who are they not attacking?) However, this is wishful thinking because it assumes TPTB are stupid, which they manifestly are not. Once they have robocops they'll repeal 2A, followed swiftly by every other human right. Until that time, cops have to be recruited somewhere.
Y'all ever considered gun control or is that taboo?
"The police are completely out of control. They're basically a street gang funded by tax dollars. Officers with dozens of complaints are sent back to the streets with almost literal carte blanche to run roughshod over minorities without a trace of accountability. Their propensity for violence and escalation has practically torn our entire country in half, while prosecutors look the other way and city officials stand by helplessly. Also, they should have all the guns."
I'm sure walking 2 steps further down the wrong road will eventually get you to the right place.
Also i thought the point of the 2nd amendment was so you could rise up and overthrow a tyrannical government. Go shoot some cops and let me know how that works out. I'll wait.
US uniformed police services started out as ethnic gangs made into paramilitary forces to suppress other ethnic gangs in the urban north and slave patrols in the rural south. The problem does not have its roots in recent militarization, and has been constant for the whole history of police forces in this country.
Shifting political preferences among the enfranchised have caused it to be a source of greater tension in the electorate, and changes in media have made it more visible, but it's not a new problem.
> Also i thought the point of the 2nd amendment was so you could rise up and overthrow a tyrannical government
The point of the 2nd Amendment was so that the people could be the security services and there would not be a need for standing military and paramilitary external and internal services (beyond small cadres to form a nucleus for the mobilized militia) which, in the founders view, inevitably led to tyranny. It was for prevention on a model that was abandoned though the amendment remains, not for response.
Well, it kind of already has happened, at least on a small scale. A number of police have been shot since this started, but not in enough numbers to really make a difference.
Unfortunately, I doubt we've made it 10% through this particular historical chapter so far. Certain people will see things like this [1], and they will start taking potshots at random cops who had nothing to do with it.
I like how you’ve added “at random cops” as if to delegitimize any reaction against an oppressive state. I think what’s more likely is that instead of just filming police brutality, people will start shooting police officers who are caught abusing citizens.
I like how you’ve added “at random cops” as if to delegitimize any reaction against an oppressive state.
No, I did that to delegitimize (sic) reactions against random individuals.
Aside from the obvious moral issue, every cop killed will probably result in a dozen more being hired, and a hundred more votes for the people doing the hiring.
Also i thought the point of the 2nd amendment was so you could rise up and overthrow a tyrannical government. Go shoot some cops and let me know how that works out. I'll wait.
It turns out that you don't need to shoot any cops. You just show up armed to the teeth, and they leave you alone. They'll even stand aside while you muscle your way into state and Federal government buildings. (Of course, this only works if you're white, but never mind that.)
Other armed (or even merely suspected to be armed) people see a more violent, not less violent, response by police.
Correct, and we're being told that the solution to that is to take away their arms. This is, of course, perfectly consistent with the original political motivation behind gun control.
Statistically speaking, if your death has a violent cause, it will happen at the hands of your own country's police or military forces. That's not a concern here in the modern-day US, but this is a historical aberration, one that may not prevail for much longer. Unilateral disarmament probably isn't the best strategy.
It is revolting and amazing to me to see the lengths to which police in the self-styled freest country in the world go to brutally repress these protests; and even more so, the fact that there still exists some defense of their behavior in the media.
In my own country, a former communist country in Eastern Europe, there were last year some anti-government protests that ended one night with the police gratuitously shooting tear gas at the crowd. This caused widespread outrage and was universally covered in the press. They didn't dare do it on subsequent protest nights again, and it remained a subject of discussion for months, with almost no defense even from the more government-friendly news outlets.
Do you have any good anti-authority songs in your country? I've been trying to think of what might be good ones in the US tradition.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
But that's an ancient one... probably the kids are way ahead of me on this front?
We do have one [0], from 1990, a series of protests right after the 1989 revolution (the protests were violently squashed by miners with pickaxes summoned by the president of that time).
It goes something like this (in a somewhat word for word translation, and keeping in mind that the big bad at the time were leaders of the former communist party):
Better a vagrant,
Than a traitor,
Better a hooligan,
Than a dictator,
Better a hoodlum,
Than a party activist,
Better dead,
Then a communist
I was too young back then, but my impression is that this was sort of sung in concert among the protesters.
I may be wrong and it may have been after the fact though, I'm not entirely sure.
The lyrical voice is meant to represent the voice of the protesters, for what that's worth - it's not singing about 'them', but about 'us'.
That related video is pretty sad to see - one of the greatest freedom fighter and labor rights[0] protest songs, perverted as a commercial for some Netflix TV series...
[0] in case you haven't heard it before, there's an even older version then the anti fascist one, which was a protest song from the women working the rice paddies in 19th century Italy: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6CW6l-A1rnk
(it's also bleakly amusing to have learned from Youtube that Paul Robeson —up until they cancelled his passport— sang different words to "Old Man River" in the US and in the USSR)
Its a vicious cycle, unfortunately. The more rioting and violent protest goes on the streets, the more they will empower the police and thus even more chance for future brutality.
If the police ignore hooliganism on the streets, it just invites more hooliganism.
If the police brutally put down hooliganism, it also invites more hooliganism.
Probably, the right solution involves better policing of police, and throwing out the bad apples. But police culture is very insular, and their labor unions have quite a bit of political power. They protect their own. So, that's easier said than done.
Regarding your first few statements, there is also a third option between ignoring the "hooligans" and brutally repressing them. It is listening to them and acquiescing to their very simple and legitimate demands - no more police brutality.
I agree with your note about policing the police though, and the difficulties in doing that. Probably trying to reduce the power of police, and its role in society, will be more feasible than trying to get prosecutors to work against their colleagues in the force.
Only a tiny, miniscule percentage of police are criminals.
They are by far amazing people who protect us.
The protesters are largely the violent ones, burning cars and destroying property, empowered by paid professionals and criminals like ANTIFA (which coincidentally are fascists themselves).
Let a court and jury judge based on a complete set of evidence, rather than the edited video clips being collected. From what I've seen, the entire videos of what these protesters do oaint a different picture.
And why is news like this even allowed on HN? Its what gets fights and trolling started.
> Only a tiny, miniscule percentage of police are criminals
Yes, most of the rest just stand by while the criminal commit crime, support unions that attack the groups calling for accountability for those crimes, and resign in solidarity when their colleagues are charged for their crimes.
The ones that are neither criminal nor complicit are rare.
As can be seen in the current protests, it is overwhelmingly the police that is the source of real violence. Killing or hurting even one person is incomparably worse than smashing a few cars or breaking some windows.
And the justice system has also been very visibly complicit with police brutality, almost universally excusing the actions of murderers when those murderers were policemen and women 'doing their duty'. In basically all of the high profile police murders that have rocked the nation, the murderers got away with it so far. So trust in the system is justifiably at an all time low.
Out of the list you provided we have the following deaths:
1. 3 Shop owner killed alleged looter / passerby
2. 4 Killed by police
3. 8 Killed by protesters/rioters/looters
4. 5 Other deaths
And that is assuming all of the looters are part of the protests, when in fact at least 2-3 of the deaths in category 3 could also be black protesters targeted by radicals, or simply robberies happening around the actual protests.
In the meantime, there are 25 separate police violence incidents on the same wiki page, with another 50 against journalists collected by a journalist. The same page reports 7 incidents of violence against the police and 4 against non-police.
So I believe my point stands. Not to mention that the police should always be held at a higher standard of conduct and respect for the law than random people.
> empowered by paid professionals and criminals like ANTIFA
Can you back that up with any evidence?
> Let a court and jury judge based on a complete set of evidence, rather than the edited video clips being collected.
That's what the current system is doing, and many people feel the results aren't right, as they see many officers abuse their power without consequence. Hence all this talk about the thin blue line, qualified immunity, adminstrative leave being perceived as a paid holiday etc.
Largely, I think there are 2 ways of thinking about systems and they're both valid.
a. You determine which rules make sense from a first principles basis and you build a system. Whatever result comes out of the system, that is the correct result, because _the system is correct_.
b. You determine which results you want to have and build a system aiming for those results. If the outcomes you're seeing don't fit with the results you want, then the system is wrong and needs changing.
Grossly simplifying, it seems to me that the right largely thinks along the lines of a. and the left thinks along the lines of b.
* The right argues for equality (same system for everyone), the left argues for equity (same outcome for everyone).
* The right argues that the police is fine because there is a system in place that deals with abusive cops. The left argues the police isn't fine because the outcomes are unfair/disproportionate. Then the right retorts that the outcomes are disproportionate because the inputs are disproportionate (e.g. unequal crime rates across racial groups). Then the left says these inputs are themselves a result of the previous unfair system. Then someone starts name calling and the reddit thread gets locked down.
And, I mean, intellectually, both view points are kinda valid.
(As a side note, hardcore free market liberalists _really_ believe in a. As in, let the market be free and, whatever the outcome is, that's the _morally right_ outcome because the free market is infallible/the best way of allocating resources. I personally think that's wrong, not becuase a. is wrong, but because the free market needs certain particular conditions to function properly e.g. no monopolies, perfect information etc, and often those conditions are not met in the real world.)
A corrollary of these views is that a. wants the system to stay unchanged and b. wants the system to change. If you're happy with the current system, you tend to subscribe to a. because of course you want things not to change. If you feel you're not getting a good deal, you're more likely to side with b. because you want the system to change. Interestingly, you also get crossover:
* in the US, priviledged upper class whites (people benefiting from the system) siding with option b. (loosely liberals). These are called "beta cucks" by e.g. users of thedonald, the implication being that they're subjugating themselves to the lesser, underpriviledged groups.
* also in the US, blacks who are part of the system (e.g. black LEOs, black republicans). Most common insults I've seen there are "bootlickers" and maybe "uncle Tom" (there was a recent video from the protests with a white protester calling a black LEO an "uncle Tom" which angered a bunch of people).
The American People will never be safe until they properly prosecute their war criminals. American policing organisations are riddled with very real war criminals calling the shots.
Don't be so surprised that what these people did to Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Yemen, they will do to the American people.