This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.
Personally, I’m not convinced cops need to go for a 100% apprehension rate all the time no matter what with 100% control of every situation.
Mostly because of the rate at which crimes happen without a cop around and then go unresolved.
A reference I never expected to see on HN.
It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.
The standards of conduct need to be draconially high, because a police officer has the power to ruin a person's life.
I don't want to watch three seasons of it just to understand the reference. A very obscure reference might deserve an explanation to make the remaining 99.9% of the readers able to understand what you mean.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender#Ba_...
Even countries with less violent police corps often have episodes like this.
To keep it out of political rallies, just think of police vs hooligans in Europe.
For example the Rayshard brooks shooting. Why was a gun needed to wake a man sleeping in a car. Why are guns needed to hand out speeding tickets.
I get that guns are needed if a bank is being robbed. But this is glorified customer service work. Imagine your car breaks down and the AAA guy who came to fix it had a gun. Like y tho?
I don't think it's very difficult to use context to understand what's being said by the commenter.
Quick spot check in my company's Slack channel -- One person in our team of 12 knew what the reference met.
I think it’d be counter-productive if everyone who didn’t understand a reference or technical concept on here wrote a comment asking for a shortcut explanation rather than maybe five minutes Googling and maybe watching a quick YouTube video (in this case).
Perhaps it's because at least some of the people they stop, for speeding or other possible offences, won't take kindly to being stopped and in many parts of the USA, those in the vehicle may be permitted to carry guns of their own...
Glorified customer service work? Far from it
OP is saying you’d need to be incredibly delusional to deny police are brutal and there’s a problem.
Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country"
To what extent do these, not uncommon - even here, sets of beliefs contribute to the problems of violence in policing? Not something that seems to me like a good idea to pretend does not exist or is minor or fringe.
In one month where the world is filled with hurricanes and every airstrip is flooded.
In fact, there are plenty of commentators downthread who don't see it as a mistake either. Years of demonisation and propaganda has gone into supporting the belief that as soon as somebody steps out of line it's necessary to beat them back into line, or shoot them if they do not comply. It's no more a mistake than the millions of people in US prisons: it's policy.
Where are you going to get the humans who are able, wanting and willing to live up those higher standards is my question for you.
Last I checked, anyone can decide at any moment to be completely broke, a drug addict, a criminal, an alcoholic, a piece of shit, have an unlimited number of children and everyone else has to support them for some reason.
What kind of standard of conduct is that?
You won't ever get people to conduct themselves properly if ignore evolution and pretend you can magically educate people into not being animals. Americans don't even bother with trying to live up to the education myth, given how much they pay school teachers. They think they can just import people with higher standards of conduct when they have to and outsource the rest. It's more profitable this way you see, to ignore reality, fund bogus economics, manufacture consent and have this planet go to shit. It's more profitable this quarter you see.
Some people just don’t spend their time watching TV.
You would easily get this from doctors in one month if they were filmed.
Considerably more in fact. Some studies say medical errors contribute to more than 250,000 deaths per year or even more. That's just deaths, not maiming.
Similar logic would apply to a position for a crane operator or a pilot. If an airline had a pattern of pilot errors, and their excuse was “if we required all our pilots to have adequate pilot training and meet stringent skill requirements, it would be very difficult to hire pilots,” would you accept that?
I guess I'm in favor of obscure references, I think even if I hadn't understood I would think that must mean something really delusional.
Isn't the issue with laws that those breaking them don't usually care about laws? I'm sure you have laws in place against murder, and murder still happens. "But there's a law against burglary, why would you want additional protection and have a strong door" isn't a good argument.
There are good arguments (and the whole issue is a good gun control argument in general), but that really isn't one.
> If you can’t find someone to fill a position as a police officer, I would suggest increasing the compensation or leaving the position unfilled before simply accepting anyone who might want to be a cop with no standards whatsoever.
Let's say we decide to pay police officers 1 million/year and really raise their standards. Great! We did it!
Why don't we just do that across the board? The answer is - we have a limited number of highly capable people.
I see the shortage of highly capable people as a problem. My previous post was a way of highlighting that. One would have to think big picture to understand the point I was making.
Regarding leaving positions unfilled - I'm not sure you've thought this through. Imagine we have a shortage of doctors and your appendix burst. Would you rather a medical student try and save your life at say, an estimated 50% success rate, or simply die?
I don't blame them, Twitter is it's own special hell and widely regarded as a bubble.
Can you explain why you feel that's terribly unfair? I don't know why somebody would pick Brazil specifically, but you might easily say "compare the US to countries with a similar income inequality". Take the gini coefficient for simplicity [1] and compare the US to Côte d'Ivoire, Argentina, Haiti, and Malaysia or Mexico, Madagascar, El Salvador, and Rwanda, depending on whether you take the CIA's numbers or the World Bank's. If you look at the list, you'll see that the European countries are closer together and in a different area of the list, the US isn't in their group.
Wouldn't that be a better indicator for "similar countries" than average internet speed or NATO membership status?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
US police forces seem to have a very short training which, as far as I understand is not centrally vetted by any federal organism? And considering the short training time it seems to be mostly focused on tactical and firearm training.
Compare that with European forces and you see a completely different reality. In Europe the police is generally seen as peace-keepers, force is absolutely a last resort (probably not so true for crowd control units but certainly true for daily policing).
Edit: I know downvote edits are frowned up but... I need to ask: why are people downvoting this? Do you not think NCIS is good example of a mainstream show?
I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the communities directly impacted by this behavior find the abuse unacceptable no matter how muddied the “but maybe there isn’t enough abuse yet.” crowd wants to dilute the issue.
And honestly, I live a fairly cushy life, and I find the officers in my city to be stand-offish and aggressive, I can only imagine how utterly horrified Id be if they behaved the way we’re seeing. There is no way anyone in my community would have been as patient if we were subjected to the same level of treatment.
And also, it’s probably important to point out, it isn’t only the physical abuse, the day to day attitude of an overbearing police force can drastically impact your own day to day quality of life.
But yeah, that's pretty radical what you're saying too. Maybe it's fair that you should only compare the richest nation on earth with much poorer developing nations with a short track record of democracy. Not sure I'd agree.
"Unfortunately we get the intellectuals we deserve".
Why? Income inequality is correlated with crime rate, why wouldn't you use that to find comparable countries? Seems useful to me, similarly to comparing diabetes rates in countries with similar levels of obesity, not based on average hair color or amount of trees per square mile.
> the richest nation on earth
You'll need to define what "richest" means, I guess. The highest GDP? Largest military spending? Does that mean a lot to somebody that is poor in the US? Would that person possibly be better off in a European country with public health insurance, a vast social safety net, high welfare etc, even though it's not "the richest country on earth" by your standards?
Looks like the original show only (at #2, after NFL). New Orleans is at #22 and Los Angeles at #28.
IMO, the issue is that the US Police are not one organization. There are over 10,000 police departments in America. In some towns, the Sheriff + Deputies are less than 10 people.
Some towns have a Sheriff who is democratically elected. This leads to massive lack of accountability, because there's no chance the Sheriff could be fired before the next election.
Under such a system, why would a Sheriff, or their deputies, ever get deescalation training?
-------------
Washington DC serves as a great example of how confusing this gets when you start actually tracing the power structures.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/14/politics/trump-church-protest...
The shear amount of "blame shifting" going on for the Lafayette Park clearing is staggering.
> More than a half-dozen officials from the National Guard, federal law enforcement and public safety agencies have challenged the Trump administration's narrative that the clearing of peaceful protesters outside the White House earlier this month was unrelated to President Donald Trump's subsequent walk to a nearby church for a photo-op, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
...
> But officials told The Post they weren't warned that US Park Police planned to push the perimeter or that force would be used.
...
> The US Secret Service issued a statement Saturday admitting that an agency employee used pepper spray on June 1 during efforts to secure Lafayette Square and clear protesters.
https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/investigations/tear-gas-g...
> US Park Police, Arlington Police, DC Metro Police and the Secret Service have all denied using any kind of chemical irritants in Lafayette Square Monday evening. But WUSA9 crews were there, witnessed tear gas being deployed and collected the canisters afterward.
So at a minimum, there are ~5 Police Forces, each with different accountability structures, involved in the Lafyette Square clearing. It probably was only ONE Police Force that messed up (probably US Park Police??) that was the site of the brutal beatdown.
But all the different organizations get the blame, even if the officers are of completely different organizations.
------------
US Citizens typically have to deal with ~3 police organizations per location. The city (or county) police, the state police, and finally the federal police.
And the Feds are organized into multiple different police: DEA, ATF, FBI, and ICE.
There's a "weak" culture... the "thin blue line" where Police Officers do stand to protect each other, even if they are from different organizations. But when it comes to accepting the blame, they actually shift the blame between each other a lot. So you need to be very knowledgeable about your local police structure before you can even cast blame in a proper manner.
Even if some organizations are considered good (ie: FBI generally has a very good reputation), other organizations (ie: ICE) have a pretty negative reputation in unwanted use of force.
------
Finally, a little example for how confusing this can get.
-- If you have a Sheriff, your only means of accountability is the election next year. A Sheriff and their deputies can pretty much do whatever they want. Any issues must be taken up with the Sheriff themselves in the meantime. If the Sheriff is uncooperative, you're left with voting them out next election (which is surprisingly difficult, because no one pays attention to local politics in America).
-- A Police "Chief" is typically a position that is held accountable by the Mayor. You can ask the Chief for police reforms, but traditionally people complain to the Mayor instead. IMO, this is a bit better than the Sheriff positions, since the Mayor can run on a platform of police reform in theory.
-- A Police Commissioner is held accountable by the City's Board. You need to convince a majority of the board member that there is a problem. Even if you convince your local board member that there's a problem, they will hold no power unless you convince the majority of the board.
-- Some municipalities, such as NYPD, have a citizen complain board, who are the dedicated organization to hear complaints. They'll issue lawyers to citizens who complain about issues to individually represent citizens in court. In these municipalities, the best action you'll get is from the citizen review board.
Most of us were forced to read 1984 and didn't really enjoy it. ATLA however, is something that we organically grew up with through high-school / college and actually paid attention to.
My group of friends would be aware of 1984 concepts... such as "Big Brother is Watching" (phrases / concepts which have escaped the book and become a thing of their own). But I don't think we'd recognize the phrase "At War with Eurasia".
Honestly, the only reason why I remember "At War with Eurasia" is because I was a quiz-bowl player and was forced to memorize key phrases from many books I barely read. Even if I did read 1984 in my high school classes, it never actually stuck with me.
You would expect directly elected police to increase accountability, but the question as always is: to whom? If the local electorate is racist, they're going to support racist violence from the police.
The very large number of police organisations produces some stupidities, like a tiny "city" that's mostly funded by stopping people going 1 mile over the speed limit on the nearby highway, but almost all the big problems are the big unitary police forces of the big cities: New York, Chicago, LA, etc.
Correct; some states have laws mandating training hours for barbers that are longer than that mandated for police [0].
> not centrally vetted by any federal organism
As with many things in the US, these rules are mostly state-based (read: 50 different, often overlapping but also often contradictory systems) but with a patchwork of federal oversight.
For example, in 2012, the federal government stepped in with a judicial document called a "consent decree" aimed at reforming the Seattle police department after "a pattern or practice of excessive force that violates the U.S. Constitution and federal law" [1].
That's an example of federal oversight, but it only happens after problems have already occurred; it only applies to the city of Seattle; and it's temporary. Only a month ago [2] the city was in court petitioning for "we're all better now, federal oversight can end".
After saying in court they were reformed and would no longer use excessive force, Seattle PD used so much tear gas in a residential neighborhood that it seeped into peoples' homes [3]. Then they announced a 30 day ban on use of tear gas [4]. Then about 48 hours later they used tear gas anyway (after using "blast balls" containing "pepper spray gas" the previous night and insisting it didn't count as tear gas). Finally a federal judge stepped in [5] and issued a 14 day ban on its use - another example of our federal oversight being reactive and not proactive.
Oh, and did I mention Seattle PD shot a "less-lethal" grenade round directly at a protester, causing enough blunt force trauma to stop her heart and require life-saving CPR? [6] That was on the same night they used tear gas after promising not to.
And they threw flashbang grenades at the medics who were trying to save her life. [7]
(in case it's not obvious, I'm a Seattle resident and I'm pissed)
Another example of how complicated our justice system can be that might surprise people from other countries is all the levels of police forces we have - city police / county sheriff / state police (plus federal law enforcement - FBI, TSA, border patrol, and so on). Especially in rural areas the county sheriff often wields a tremendous amount of power [8].
0: https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/28/us/jobs-training-police-trnd/...
1: http://www.seattlemonitor.com/overview
2: https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/05/08/city-of-seattle-fi...
3: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/04/43840246/seattle...
4: https://crosscut.com/2020/06/seattle-issues-30-day-ban-tear-...
5: https://www.kuow.org/stories/federal-judge-in-seattle-bans-u...
6: https://www.kuow.org/stories/this-26-year-old-died-three-tim...
7: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gywxhz/folks_i_nee...
8: https://theappeal.org/the-power-of-sheriffs-an-explainer/
Where I live, we drive cars, but we don’t fight the overseas oil wars. We’ve outsourced all that brutality to the US. That lets us smugly reap the benefits and point fingers at Americans for the violent, backwards, gun-toting culture.
I don't. I have a sheriff and I barely keep up with the issue between elections. And to be honest, local police in my area are a non-issue, I've never had issues with them personally. (IMO: this is because I live in a richer suburban area. Police are well paid, college-educated, and low-stress compared to the city police)
Between the county council, my city's mayor, the state governor, the state representative, the state senator, my US Senator, my US Representative, the President, the School superintendant, roughly 4 or 5 different judges, and the sheriff... I'm frankly leaving most of my election sheet blank during elections.
Besides, the Sheriff has been running unopposed for the last decade. Even if there was an issue, its not like there's even another guy for me to vote for.
I'd have much more trust in a Chief or Commissioner setup. I at least know the name of my county executive and somewhat keep up with what my county executive does.
But the only way you can convince me that my local police, that I'm voting for directly, has any issue, is if protests erupted in my local neighborhood. A lot of these videos that are being posted online do not apply to me or my vote.
> The very large number of police organisations produces some stupidities, like a tiny "city" that's mostly funded by stopping people going 1 mile over the speed limit on the nearby highway, but almost all the big problems are the big unitary police forces of the big cities: New York, Chicago, LA, etc.
Is it really? Think about it. The NYC officers who shoved the man were fired pretty quickly. While its basically impossible to fire a Sheriff.
Hypothetically, how would you convince me or raise awareness if my local sheriff was a problem? No major protests were in my neighborhood.
And I'm somewhat connected and informed about these matters. I've got friends who are fully ignorant, or are even 100% on the police side on this issue. How do you expect to convince them to vote for a new sheriff?
But of course that's not going to happen. For modern people with attention span of a goldfish it's too much of an effort to read long texts - thus they'll just keep watching the news, or reading short, one-sided tweets full of hate.
Which at the end of the day is what BLM is about, not so much the individual abuses. All that extra policing isn't distributed fairly. There are some communities in the US where the police are the kind of hands-off/come-only-when-called benefactors people expect, and there are some communities where they act more like a street gang controlling their territory, stopping and confronting anyone who seems likely to challenge their authority.
My anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise, but I’d love some real data - how are you measuring that?
Also, HN is a global community, and even though many television shows are watched internationally, their impact on pop culture overall can be drastically different. So, you can't assume a major show in your country will be readily recognized by your fellow nerds in another country.
Oh, but those aren't the same thing, so they're irrelevant? That's fine, because the examples you gave (pilots, crane operators, fast food chains) also have nothing to do with one another. Not the same number of operators, not the same jobs, not the same safety systems, not the same number of potential cases, not the same risk probability, not the same variables. But why be rational about what we can just get emotional over?
The United States has 330 Million people. To come up with 700 cases of police violence, all you have to do is find 700 people out of 330 Million who are being arrested for something. Find the number of arrests, find the number where people resisted, compare it to the number of cases of police arresting or detaining people without incident. You can't find that data in video clips or the news because nobody reports calm arrests, or non-arrests. I'd be very surprised if anyone cared to find out what the 700 number actually means in context.
This whole document is just horror porn to use for firing up people so they'll get angry and not use their brains. It's a very smart thing to do if you want to push a particular outcome. And I'm not saying that's even a bad thing under the circumstances. But it's quite clearly propaganda.
The statue of a slaver and mass murderer had been controversial for the past 30 years. I wonder if things would have gone differently if the "recontextualisation" plaque had been allowed.
There has, predictably, been a backlash. Resulting in this fiasco where a guy came from Essex to defend some statues he didn't understand ended up urinating on a monument he didn't notice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-53040301
Mobs are not the law.
I mean the richest nation on earth bar none. The amount of wealth in the nation. Literally that. The USA cannot plead poverty as an excuse for why anything is worse there than any other nation. Do you see it now?
So what though? Do European countries like the UK (that are usually with the US when it's time to bomb somebody in the Middle East) outsource their domestic violence?
Really, you need to provide some evidence for "we have less crime, less murders, less police violence because the US has more". "The US has more income inequality because it has to fight wars for the European countries" doesn't follow either, so please don't.
These are all late 20s, early 30s people, Brazilians, Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch and so on, 1984 would immediately be known by most, quite a few have read it, none (even if they know about ATLA, what many don't) would get the reference.
Interesting I can cite a conversation I had not long ago with them to act as anecdotal data, I'm really interested to see what is the split here.
I don't think US-citizens by and large want that change bad enough to accept restrictions upon their freedoms and an end to low taxes, European-level wealth redistribution does not seem to be popular in the US. I suppose they'd like the result without doing it. Unfortunately that's like wanting to be great at tennis without wanting to put in the training: understandable, but not happening.
Since it was American made, that makes it a cartoon and not an anime.
1984 is a very popular and influential book.
I fairly confident that if you asked the authors of Avatar The Last Airbender they would tell you straight that they’d based that idea on 1984.
I’d be willing to bet people will be quoting 1984 long after ATLA has been forgotten.
The original two posters in this thread were also intimately familiar with Ba Sing Se / Avatar the Last Airbender. So multiple people here are fully aware of the reference and are in good communication.
I probably wouldn't reach for a reference to ATLA myself. But, apparently its popular enough that plenty of different posters in this very discussion are aware of it and able to explain to other people here the concept.
I have no doubt that American can-do and talent will get it done.
None.
Just decide what it is, what the scoreboard looks like and get it done as Americans the American way.
Thanks for laying out some of that context on Seattle PD.
Your belief is (?) that the US aggregate violence/whatever is in no meaningful way confounded with the levels you measure in (say) EU nations: any confounding is small enough to make no difference?
We have a population of 200 (nations) of very diverse size and age, all related by historic and present competition and cooperation. Is there any fair shot at comparing apples to apples?
What sort of “evidence” would you reasonably concede to?
states run themselves, and the federal judiciary basically only steps in when state/local governments don't follow their own rules (the presumed expression of the will of the people) or violate the constitution. the constrained executive response follows from the judiciary (and sometimes the legislature).
and that's the way it should be. you want power local and limited, not consolidated and far away. that would only make things like use of force worse.
so the immediate appeal to authority should be to the local, and then state, judiciary and legislature stepping in with corrective actions. the feds aren't of much use here. they're intentionally a line of last (and slow) resort.
But that only works for super powers? Why is there no trend visible for countries like Switzerland who are traditionally neutral and never fight wars with neighboring countries like France who or Germany who have a larger active military, do engage in NATO wars etc? Why aren't the Chinese shooting each other on a similar scale? Why weren't the Germans during the early 20th century when they were very militaristic? Why were the US already at similar levels in the first half of the 20th century, before becoming a global super power that others may have "outsourced" their wars to?
> What sort of “evidence” would you reasonably concede to?
Minimum requirements: has some sort of rule that allows predictions that can be falsified other than "it's only true in this super specific narrow case of the USA in last 5 decades of human history, but not in any other place or during any other time".
It feels like looking for super complicated reasons that require American Exceptionalism (as in "does not apply to any other country") to explain something that is explained by well-studied phenomena that do not require US citizens to function fundamentally different than other humans in other places or other times.
"Oh well I guess its just really hard." Is NOT an answer.
In fact, you cant really call someone a criminal until they've been convicted of a crime - cue the video of the cops being called by the black store owner, punching him in the face and breaking his jaw while the white thief leaves.
Why are you distorting my answer?
Look, I can rephrase it for you: it's also not surprising that there aren't 700 videos of scientists molesting women on arctic research stations.
Normal summer weekend you have at least couple dozen people shot(not by cops, so you never hear about them)
Maybe in your country but in many, many places in the world this is demonstrably not the case.
Those are 'real' accidents; and if some are not, like DUI, there are laws against them that are enforced. If tomorrow, society stops charging DUI offenders people would protest too.
That's not the case with police brutality. We have seen again and again the police face no consequences for their brutality. That's what the people are protesting against. If every one of these cops were appropriately fired, charged and jailed, this wouldn't be a big of an issue. That simply does not happen.
The second point being, theoretically people trust cops to keep law and order and to ensure safety. So it is rightly expected for them to have higher standard of conduct and the fact that this does not happen is a systemic failure.
However, it is worth pointing out that there are around 750,000 police officers in the US. It is hard to deny that finding and or training 750,000 highly capable people is a very difficult problem.
Let me remind you that the whole discussion started by me highlighting the popularity of The Last Airbender (due to Netflix, as someone pointed out) by comparing it to a mainstream show. I could have taken any popular show but thought taking the one topping the charts would be enough to illustrate it. Apparently not, and in the future I must carefully review the viewing habits of the whole HN community in order to make a point and not offend anyone.
So let me revise the comment: The Last Airbender is as mainstream as any other popular show today.
A theory where every nation is a data point can’t get you anywhere. All the nations interact meaning we should reason about the system as a whole.
I say something about a nation, you expect me to back it up with other nations. But there are very few data points, and they are interconnected, and the problem has a huge number of dimensions.
It’s like I claim opposable thumbs are good for tool making and you ask me to show five other body parts where that applies.
If you read the sibling comments they are trying to say NCIS is not mainstream at all since TV ratings mean nothing, making the opposite point of yours. You guys are impossible.
Actual genres would be "Shonen" (Dragonball Z, Full Metal Alchemist, My Hero Academia), "RomCom" (Ah My Goddess, SNAFU), "Magical Girl" (Sailor Moon, Pretty Cure), Mecha (Gundam), "Sci Fi" (Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in a Shell), "Mindfuck" (Evangeleon, Paprika, Paranoia Agent), or "Isekai" (Overlord, Sword Art, Slime)
And a few shows are blend between genres. Both Inuyasha and Kenshin are Shonen + RomCom blends for example. There are a few shows I can't pin down exactly (Little Witch Academia doesn't seem to follow any genre rules... too many action scenes / stress to be Iyashi. Not enough transformation scenes to be magical girls. Not cute enough to be a moe. Too much supernatural to be slice of life)
---------
Each genre of anime has its own art style, expectations, and writing style. Avatar would probably be a Shonen if I were to pin it to a specific genre (Child protagonist, action scenes aimed primarily at young male audiences... a "Shonen" or young male demographic). Avatar's artstyle is reminiscent of Shonen as well.
Paprika is definitely an "anime", but look at Paprika's art style: https://i.imgur.com/Sf0jtn0.png
Or "Night is short, Walk on Girl": https://i.imgur.com/Tz7w9bo.png
Both Paprika and "Night is short..." are anime and considered anime by the whole community. But stylistically, they are no where close to Avatar, DBZ, Full Metal Alchemist.
--------
The most consistent definition of anime is Japanese origin, or at least "Eastern" cartoons. "Anime-style" describes Avatar, Teen Titans, and RWBY. But its not really acceptable in the community to call those shows "anime". But I guess if we want to get technical about genres and definitions, "Anime" is a word that's too ill-defined to really be useful in these kinds of discussions.
Seems like that would embolden mobs to destroy whatever they want. Doesn't seem like an intelligent or sustainable strategy.
...but the unfortunate reality is that allowing mobs to destroy property become a feedback loop because they then realize that mobs can destroy anything they like with impunity.
That's no way to run a civilization.
Sure, but there's little/nothing that suggests the effect you speculate about, it seems to have no parallel in history although empires have existed before, there are counter examples ... so it seems not too likely that that is the cause. Of course, no two days are the same, no two countries are the same and no two countries are even the same with regard to their not-same-ness on two different days, but countries and cultures move slow enough, and countries and humans are similar enough that we'd see such obvious and large patterns, I believe.
On the other hand, we have other explanations that have supporting evidence, apply to multiple situations etc, so they seem more likely. When you present a new theory, claim that it cannot be falsified because no two countries are exactly the same (and therefore no relationships between countries can be the same), I think you should offer some evidence to support that theory instead of asking others to just accept it.
That article doesn't say much about the guy who urinate, how do you know what he knew/understood, or where he came from?
Sure, there are also some people who violate gun laws. But those people could be a threat to everyone, not just cops, yet surely we wouldn’t justify everyone to preemptively have their guns drawn in all human interactions.
I'm your age and I never even heard of Avatar the Last Airbender. I'm sure my younger cousins know about it.
This is also a stupid, unnecessary, ongoing tragedy that America insists cannot be avoided despite being the only country where mass shootings happen anything like as regularly.
I'm curious how many protestors or rioters keep their phones on them (with location/COVID apps or otherwise.) Even if they don't, plenty of others are taking the videos.
as with markets, idiosyncratic conditions like sociopathy can lead to pockets of undue concentrations of power, no doubt.
but it would be even worse if those same conditions were concentrated on and elevated to wider populations. by distributing power, you can more effectively pit one against the other, and have some chance of bettering conditions over time. those chances decrease with power concentration.
it's worse if we had the same sordid problems at a state or national level. it's rolling the dice once or 50 times vs. rolling them ~50,000 times.
Not necessarily drawn, but isn't that pretty much the reason you have public carry laws in the first place? Surely even the worst of cars does provide sufficient protection against roaming coyotes and mountain lions. The only predator left to fear is another human.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/outrage-vide...
It is extremely hard to react with anything but EXTREME vitriol to comments like yours - police are using excessive force deliberately, and then arresting people with no cause who post videos of their crimes.
I’m not asking you to accept anything: I don’t evangelize. In particular I have no theory that generalizes over nations. It seems very limiting. Like ignoring a mechanism I see work in my apartment because it doesn’t hold true for buildings writ large.
Edit: Probably shouldn’t have written “the superpower” posts ago because that makes it sound like a general claim.
This is a technical nicety not available to a policeman in a real situation. If someone points a gun at them, that someone is a criminal, even if they are "technically" not.
Without more context, I'm guessing their parents took them to a protest and acted illegally. If so, I think that's rather poor parenting.
There doesn't seem to be a link to the full video (or any video), so take that with a grain of salt.
There has to be a limit to 'higher standards' humans can live up to, I hope we can agree on that. If you agree, you can't deny that we can't have higher standards indefinitely.
We can have higher standards a little bit and we can fake achieving higher standards a lot by moving highly capable people from one set of jobs to another (from jobs X, Y, Z to police officer by paying them 1 million/year) and doing a marketing campaign that convinces the ignorant masses that real progress has been made.
My previous posts were pointing out that wanting higher standards and not having any standards for the people who create and raise new humans, are incompatible and have to be reconciled if you want to actually have higher standards, not fake higher standards via re-distribution of highly capable people.
Twitter as another resource was an example. But yes, you can look on Twitter and find many different perspectives about a topic. I would think someone who knows how to spend some time understanding multiple perspectives of an issue knows how to look in many different places for them.
As far as the rest of your comment, I think you're going way off-base here. Sorry.
Nevertheless, a large percentage of situations can be de-escalated by police forces. What is even less acceptable, is that in many cases the escalation is originating from police officers. Which is why, to me, de-escalation and conflict management training is lacking among these officers.
Going back to your point, it is a really complex issue and I am not going to claim a deep understanding of US society.
There is a huge percentage of GDP spent on welfare in most EU countries, the welfare and safety nets put in place are (mostly) accepted in the EU because of a sense of solidarity and dignity and a mutual understanding that _anyone_ can be caught in a situation where they are facing social/family/health/finacial issues. Being misfortunate should not be punished with falling through the cracks of society. I get the impression that in the US this type of belief would be an outlier.
However, putting aside the humanitarian values, there is a very practical and utilitarian aspect to EU welfare and social benefits programs, they actually detract people from marginal behaviour because it stops them from being pushed into a corner.
There is a lot of evidence that social welfare safety nets reduce crime. Equally, there is evidence that insufficient welfare correlates with crime rise. [0]
And this I think, is a huge cultural shift. The outrage in the US would be huge if we tried to rationalize that we have to take tax money from everyone, to give free-money to people on the fringes of society, in order to reduce gun violence. However, all the EU policies for the past 40 years confirm this reasoning.
[0] Social determinants of health in relation to firearm-related homicides in the United States: A nationwide multilevel cross-sectional study, D. Kim, 2019 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Hiring and firing by this metric is also lacking.
Its not really a system I'm a fan of. The voting population only can pay attention to so many issues, we should have our representatives pick (and hold accountable) more positions.
