On the other, it's known that the framers of the Constitution meant for the people to have access to arms partly as a hedge against governmental use of arms against the people. If facial recognition is a tool that the government will use against the people, then the framers clearly envisioned restricting the government's ability to prevent people from using facial recognition.
By default I tend to side with the Constitutional order, so I favor the people having unrestricted access to facial recognition tech. That said, I do see the chaos facial rec will bring. Not only for police, but frankly, for everyone else as well. Better start finding a side door out of that hotel tryst with your secretary fellas. Hypothetically, the wife could use some popular new facial rec service that runs against all the public photo or video upload sites for the day. You could be busted if you go out the front door of the hotel just when some college girl is snapping a selfie to share with the world. Or some dad thinks sharing a picture of his son's football team, taken at just that instant, would be really cool. All of which show you and your secretary exiting the hotel in the background.
> it's known that the framers of the Constitution meant for the people to have access to arms partly as a hedge against governmental use of arms against the people
TL;DL: The idea that U.S. citizens should arm themselves to defend against a tyrannical government appears to be a relatively new idea. The text of the 2nd amendment is vague and unclear:
> A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The original intentions are shrouded in a historical fog of obscurity.
So really, like most of the Constitution, the meaning is up to the people and the courts. That's why we established the Supreme Court, to help us establish the living meaning behind the Constitution ... oh wait:
It's important to take the 2nd Amendment WITH the 3rd Amendment. They complement each other in the framers eyes. Also, it's important to understand that contemporary terms muddy the waters.
The framers considered the military to be the only arm of force the government held. The police force wasn't a thing at the time. The 3rd Amendment says the government shall not quarter forces with the people, more or less. This seems to imply that the military shouldn't be deployed amongst the population as a means of applying the force of the government, which has a monopoly on force. Understanding the 3rd Amendment in this context provides a very clear picture of the 2nd Amendment. The people should have a well-regulated militia, with which they police themselves.
Interesting point about the 2nd amendment. With that in mind I’d have to agree then that civilians should be able to employ facial recognition tech against the government.
The real question though is if that is a tenable strategy in the long term. Like that hatebreed song goes, “fight fire with fire and you’ll see everyone is burning”
Privacy rights shift with reasonable expectations. Soon, no one will have a reasonable expectation of anonymity anywhere in public, and therefore no right to privacy in a public space. However, you can still have that right in, say, your own home with the shades drawn.
Why would you have any reasonable expectation to have privacy in your house? There are cameras and microphones in your home, build into hardware devices you neither understand nor control, which are permanently connected to their corporate control servers. While you watch TV the TV watches you, while you shop in an online store, the store takes note what products you look at, and when you call your mom, your call is automatically transcribed and scanned for vile evilness by agencies that will defend the secrecy of their methods with violence against the general population.
Your argument about public spaces works just as well for private spaces. If this trend continues there will be no reasonable expectations of privacy at all.
Why would you have any reasonable expectation to have privacy in your house?
Americans do.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Well, that's not really a "right to privacy" except in how it's been interpreted in court. So, Common Law says it we have the right, because of the precedent of past interpretations. The precedent also holds that the meaning of the right to privacy will drift over time as technology changes.
It is not an "unreasonable search" if you install the cloud-enabled camera that is embedded in some other device yourself and click ok on a ten page legal contract you didn't read.
I don't see a big difference between the two in the matter of how the "reasonable expectations" of people are formed by technological realities. Sure there are minuscule formal differences, but on the grand scale going off-grid is like walking around in public with a ski-mask to avoid facial recognition.
I don't think this is a valid criticism. You seem to be criticizing the idea of a man cheating on his wife, as if the parent comment was endorsing the behavior.
The parent comment was giving an easily-imagined example of how facial recognition can impact an everyday person. You don't have to be in the spotlight to be affected - you could be affected by facial recognition even if you're trying your best to go unseen, which the parent comment does a great example of demonstrating.
You come off as really wanting to shift the topic from the privacy of the man in the example. Theoretically the wife might find the truth, the camera manufacturer might make more business, the utility company may make more money from the camera, but those are frankly irrelevant to the original point: ubiquitous facial recognition brings a risk to even ordinary people. That's not changed just because others may benefit.
> How are you going to get anyone to become a policeman?
Ideally, you aren't; you are going to disband the centralized, omnipurpose paramilitary law enforcement entities known as "police departments", redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities that for the most part are not exclusively, or even centrally, law enforcement, and not violate the public trust the way police departments have broadly and systematically done over an extended period of time.
U.S. civilians own nearly 400 million firearms, which is larger than the country's population. The intentional homicide rate is comparable to Kenya, Pakistan, Ecuador, or Argentina (5x higher than Western Europe). Are you sure that police will be able to operate effectively without being armed in a somewhat militaristic manner?
> redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities
What will happen if I call 911 and report someone stole from me at gunpoint? What if I report that someone violated my restraining order against them? What if I report that someone is yelling threateningly at waitstaff at a restaurant?
> not violate the public trust
While we absolutely need more oversight, there are over ~55,000,000 documented police-public encounters in a given year, and ~1,000 cases of lethal force used by police (vast majority were people attempting to harm the officers).
The rate of lethal force as a percent of interactions: 0.0000206473%.
The rate of lethal force against the total U.S. population: 0.00000343477%.
It's a good distinction, so I asked what would happen in each of the three cases. I think that's one of the trickiest parts of this concept.
In a country as armed and violent as the United States, escalation happens quickly and dangerously. We've all seen videos of officers pulling a car over for speeding and being executed the moment they look away, there's been more than a few in the past couple months alone [1] [2] [3]. Nearly any situation can become lethal for the officer and civilians [4], so I think it's fair to ask in what situations there would be an armed responder.
>> redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities
> What will happen if I call 911 and report someone stole from me at gunpoint? What if I report that someone violated my restraining order against them?
Exactly right. A few weeks ago there was a shooting in my neighborhood. I heard the gunshots but before I could find my phone to dial 911 the much maligned Seattle PD were already here. They may not have been obliged to come, but they did come, and fast.
My anecdotal experiences have been that police haven't done anything to help or protect me every time I have asked for help. Your anecdotal experience seems to be different. Do you have any data to support your 99% claim?
Quote: "The rate of lethal force against the total U.S. population: 0.00000343477%"
I would argue that anything above 0.00% is wrong. Police must and should always use non-lethal approach. Regardless of their situation. Sound / visual / sensory approach would incapacitate the violent persona and bring it to justice. Police in now way should be granted judge and executioner roles.
We are either consider life precious or not at all. No middle ground.
What are you talking about? Shooting syrings instead of bullets to incapacitate is one low cost that can easily be deployed. Not to mention a plethora of all other non-lethal weaponry that exists. Another is this, though less economical viable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System.
You know, the bad murder stats in your first paragraph do not suggest people should trust the police. They suggest police is not doing good job and that people are rightly frustrated
> You know, the bad murder stats in your first paragraph do not suggest people should trust the police.
Yeah, I don't know why the biggest argument people raise against radical reform of the US law enforcement system is "the current system is doing a spectacularly bad job at controlling crime, so we shouldn't mess with it".
Seeing a high crime rate doesn't automatically call for radical reform — and in a way abolition — of the status quo of law enforcement.
Why is the crime rate high? Is it really because of police, or do they help? How will some radical restructuring reduce it?
There are many questions here.
Preventative policing, while effective in social democratic countries with low inequality like the Nordics, isn't on the table when we see violent crime that mirrors African and South American countries. Disincentivizing homicide in a country rife with inequality and materialism is a harder task than we imagine.
There are ~900,000 police officers in the United States, and 240 million 911 calls, and 50 million police-public interactions. That's an average of over 50 interactions per day for a police officer.
African and South American countries you have in mind have typically highly corrupt police force. Police themselves being often also criminals or cooperating with them is big part of problem. I dont think that is argument for why it is good idea to adopt their tactics.
The murder clearance rates are quite low when I checked, so at least part of issues is the way police prioritize their work. And you wont raise murder clearance rates by surveilling protesters nor by having guns from army nor by arresting people for loitering and what not.
You cant disincentivize homicide when you don't catch murderers. And most murders are also among people who know each other, not random events.
> There are ~900,000 police officers in the United States, and 240 million 911 calls, and 50 million police-public interactions. That's an average of over 50 interactions per day for a police officer.
Every Communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.
- Mao Zedong
It's easy to wonder how the government would collect taxes without armed police. Or confiscate guns if stricter gun control laws are created. The reality is, of course, that they merely want to defund or disarm this version of the police.
Key part is "ideally". In Minneapolis, council is already backtracking on defund the police movement as crime has spiked, mostly affecting the poor. Is there an example of a country where there is no police?
None that I know of but my understanding was that people take issue with the police using military equipment and tactics. Most western police forces are trained to deescalate which doesn’t seem to be the case in most(all?) US states.
One of the most interesting points here is that people are looking at the United States, comparing it to Western Europe, and saying "we need to defund police" or "we need to disarm police."
The metric we should look at is not GDP per capita (which is how the U.S. bears similarity to Europe), it is crime.
If you look at intentional homicide rates among large countries (>1m population), the U.S. is comparable to countries like Ecuador, Argentina, Kenya, and Pakistan [1].
The U.S. intentional homicide rate is bigger than Western European countries by a factor of 4 or 5.
What happens to the US homicide (or any violent crime) rate when you take the illegal drugs supply chain out of the equation?
I already know the answer. It makes the place look a hell of a lot like Western Europe.
The people not making their living outside the law don't need more police and they sure as shit don't need more militarized police. The largest group of people who are making their living outside of the law can easily be made to not be doing that by an act of congress.
General crime rate will decrease as you legalize recreational drug use, but there's no reason to believe that will resolve the many issues that lead to homicide in the United States.
It will reduce the profitability of the drug trade, which may result in less crimes or an increase in other crimes. It may also increase the number of people addicted to drugs, which, in the United States, leads to an exponential increase in both violent crime and property crime [1].
There's many other forms of crime and homicide than drug-related, and plenty of people need the police for reasons that are not related to drugs.
Separately, those people would not be making their living "not outside the law," they would be out of work. Drug legalization doesn't mean we allow existing supply chains from violent cartels.
> The metric we should look at is not GDP per capita (which is how the U.S. bears similarity to Europe), it is crime.
A major contention of the defund/dismantle movement is that the US prioritization of paramilitary law enforcement for local funding exacerbates the social problems that create crime, even if you don't count crime-by-police.
Total U.S. police spending is around $100 billion, which is around $285/person/year.
Considering over 240 million 911 calls are placed in a given year, at a surface level this feels extremely efficient — certainly more so than other parts of our bureaucracy.
Crime occurs for social, cultural, and/or financial reasons — focusing on the financial, we have a giant bureaucratic and inefficient government, an incredibly large population, and a lot of waste. I don't think one could argue the $24/person/month we pay for police would make a substantial difference / stop a ton of crime.
> Considering over 240 million 911 calls are placed in a given year
But if you cut the police spending by, say, 50% and used that money instead to providing social services, mental health services, etc., how many of those 911 calls go away?
> Despite the uptick of crime in his ward, Cunningham, who supports the creation of a new community safety agency to replace the police department, said it’s particularly important now to start instituting some of those public health-based approaches to violence prevention. Recently, the council took more than $1 million from the police budget to hire “violence interrupters” to intervene and defuse potentially violent confrontations. [1]
> “If we have these systems in place we are getting ahead of the violence,” said Cunningham. “That’s why I have advocated so strongly for the violence interrupters, because if they are interrupting the violence before the guns are being fired, then the MPD doesn’t have to respond to that violence.”
> “What I am sort of flabbergasted by right now is colleagues, who a very short time ago were calling for abolition, are now suggesting we should be putting more resources and funding into MPD,” Cunningham said.
I'm questioning the general competence of politicians when the best solution they have is hiring unarmed citizens to... interrupt potentially armed and unhinged aggressors?
You think that monitoring armed employees of the state to identify abuses using technology as threatening as a camera is... equivalent to right-wing anarchy? You seriously think that it will be impossible to recruit officers if they might have people monitor their on the job behavior and call them out for doing things that are illegal. The military seems to do alright...
I do not condone violence and at the moment the police seem to be doing most of it. There needs to be a check on that.
> I do not condone violence and at the moment the police seem to be doing most of it. There needs to be a check on that.
I guess your opinion then fully depends on where the MSM camera are pointed toward, because you've got to be awfully blind if you think ONLY the police has been violent.
You heard: "you think ONLY the police has been violent"
I said: "I do not condone violence"
You seem to heave heard: "I do not condone violence [and don't think anyone except for police has used it]."
Try harder.
I am aware that others are violent, but they're also not pepper spraying people milling around with their kids or black bagging people on the street.
Someone who claims to have the most dangerous job in America getting nervous about being identified while pepper spraying protestors has got an uphill battle convincing me that they're the victim. Armed agents of the state also clearly have to have a role in a country with as many guns as ours.
They should conduct themselves professionally enough that they aren't pepper spraying people sitting in the street and aiming rubber bullets at their heads. Start there. If you are captured on film pepper spraying some 20 year old kid sitting on the street in the face for a solid twenty seconds? No, you are absolutely not qualified to carry a firearm, much less "protect the peace".
Seems like the Medieval Times want their knights back.
What will happen if domain-specific entities protect their specific regions and there are issues with other entities near-by?
What have the Romans ever done for us? There has been local law enforcement for ages until empires started. Civilization happens because somebody unites a region under one law enforcement. It's not pretty for everybody, but by which force should domain specific forces not fight each other if central authority is disbanded?
> What will happen if domain-specific entities protect their specific regions and there are issues with other entities near-by?
Domain here meaning function, not territory. What we currently have for local law enforcement is mainly territory-based all-purpose paramilitary forces. (State and federal law enforcement is mostly divided among domain-specific agencies, most of which report to top-level departments with some focus other than generic law enforcement.)
> but by which force should domain specific forces not fight each other if central authority is disbanded?
No one has suggested disbanding central authority, either at local or higher levels, only disbanding centralized all-purpose local paramilitary law-enforcement agencies.
"Domain specific entities" means splitting up the many tasks currently handled by police into separate organizations specialized in those tasks -- public safety has different needs from traffic enforcement which has different needs from domestic disputes or mental health issues.
The idea is to reduce the central militarized force with a plurality of nonviolent support services and unarmed law enforcement in addition to a significantly smaller force, trained and responsible for handling rampages, well-organized bank heists etc. If these domains intend to fight one another, let it happen in court.
> you are going to disband the centralized, omnipurpose paramilitary law enforcement entities known as "police departments", redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities that for the most part are not exclusively, or even centrally, law enforcement, and not violate the public trust the way police departments
In other words, disband PD to create... another PD.
Why is it acceptable that police use facial recognition to target protestors, but "doxxing" when activists use that same technology to hold police accountable?
You're interpreting from my comment a viewpoint, but I'm really just answering the exact question. The police do need to be held to a higher standard than civilians.
If anything, cops should be held to a higher standard, so whatever's good enough for them to use against us should be doubly good enough to use against them.
By virtue of magical "government" dust. Made by the same substance used to create ink for the sacred "Social Contract" document that can't be broken, except if you move to Somalia where it has no power. /f
On a more serious note, this is the stuff Libertarians have been talking about for decades. There is no consistency to government power and laws at all, so it's all smoke and mirrors. And only backed by circular power. I.e. Government gives itself legitimacy because it is government.
In a perfect world, that’s something which only bad cops have anything to worry about.
We’re not in a perfect world, and — as all humans are imperfect — evidence of badness will accumulate in even the best of us. I wish I knew how to fix that, because it also applies to literally all online activity, and isn’t just a cops thing.
> So police should be exempted from mass surveillance ban ?!?
Whatever the solution ends up being, I want the police to be the same as everyone else with regard to that solution.
I don’t really get normal human psychology, so I don’t know if everybody or nobody should have facial recognition software in public places, but I do think it should be a choice of “everybody or nobody”.
Police is here to serve the public, so naturally public may want to impose rules on police which it doesn't want to impose on itself. It all depends on who wants what (and for what).
Weird thing how the US was once a penal colony, isn't it? Defining "the criminal element" is always a relative matter, and varies over time. The very people who coined that phrase were considered criminals by the government whose rule they contested.
> why would anyone in their right mind take the job
Nutjobs who want power over others and are willing to imperil themselves to pursue it will continue to become cops. By discouraging people in their right mind from joining the police, the police will become more dangerous. 'All Cops Are Bad' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Technically, I know many 'good' cops who've left policing because of the bad cops. So, I guess maybe in 2005, this would've been true in the context that our current reality is that we've already arrived at the 'All Cops are Bad' era. That's also about the time the FBI first put out warnings about White Supremacists taking over the police...
I think there is a snowball effect; the more bad cops there are, the more good cops quit. A terrible feedback cycle.
Unfortunately I think some police reform/abolition activists have decided to accelerate this feedback loop under the theory that making things much worse is the only way to make things better. 'ACAB' makes bad cops think they're in good company while probably making good cops want to quit (and similarly filters new police recruits.) The premise is presumably that when cops get worse, more of the public will support reform. 'Accelerationist' approaches like thus might be well intentioned, but I think the consequences are more likely to be disastrous.
How will you get anybody to work at an abortion clinic, slaughterhouse, or publisher of pornography given there is some nutjob who would be angry with them for it? The same way - they get paid money for it and have benefits, duh.
Escalate appropriately to targetting family - you know the same way they would if crazed vegans attacked a meat packing worker. Anyone so cowardly they cannot accept working for a living for an entity /with a legal monopoly on use of force/ has no business being a police officer. If they cannot accept being protected like everybody else we don't want the cravens.
Finally some acknowledgement that facial recognition is not solely a tool of oppressors. I've been arguing for years that the best option for these kinds of surveillance tools is not regulation but widespread public use.
We don't know what affect this technology will have on our society, so I for one think caution is called for. So much of the fabric of our society is built on the expectation of anonymity in public places - this loss has both good and bad aspects, but its a huge change, no matter what.
Sure, but the cat's out of the bag. We have nearly ubiquitous cameras, and huge databases of images. I think it's essentially impossible to regulate that back to old expectations of anonymity.
Back in the old days, you could just go to the next town, take on a new name, and build a new life. Or, you could sexually assault a woman while in high school, then become a Supreme Court Justice. We may need to adjust our sense of what things are forgivable, since in the future none of us will be able to simply leave the past behind.
Edit: If it wasn't obvious, that was sarcasm about the Supreme Court Justice. I think it's a tragedy he was appointed, and was alluding to the idea that if that house party had cameras streaming to the public internet, it wouldn't have happened.
Why does that matter? There's this technology called 'gait recognition' which is more accurate than facial, and can tell you from another regardless of what you're wearing.
Tools like this can be used to empower the people against evil, whether government-sanctioned or otherwise. But privacy-activists are successfully making such tools "illegal" under the guise of "privacy rights", leaving it only in the realm of government use (for now).
It would draw way too much aggro for little gain without any "legitimate usage" traffic to draw any substantial objections to shutting it down regardless of any technicalities be they technical or legal. Fund ingress and exit points are fundamentally a weakness for any form of "stealth" money transfer, even cryptocurrency if they are to actually be spent on anything material. Spies have been busted by spending their bribes as clearly beyond their means even if they overextended lines of credit when they were specifically not to because of worries of compromise. Otherwise it is a big risk for nothing and well - if you are willing and able to get away with murder without getting paid why aren't you a successful serial killer already or taking risks by taking requests if you are?
Neat little cyberpunk device but doesn't quite work in reality without some other foundational assumption changes for things like "actually somehow provides substansially better life insurance even if it may also be used to place a hit on you".
Maybe... but after we had a baby, I bought life insurance to protect the family from the unforeseen loss of income in the event anything happens to me.
I was talking to the person doing my physical and he mentioned that most men he sees are being ‘nagged’ in to buying insurance by their wives after a baby.
I found that to be interesting. It’s ultra irresponsible to not have some coverage, and if I were on the other side, I would nag too.
Is this true? I have seen many articles about companies taking out life insurance policies on low-level employees and not informing anyone. One woman sued a Corp for the proceeds after her husband died.
Would be cool to make a "not a hotdog" style phone app where you hold your camera up to someone's face and it tells you if they are a recognized cop or not.
Or even just a new "Google-Like" facial rec service that trawls and indexes the public content on photo and video upload sites all day. You hold your phone up to someone's face and it returns a list of "results". The photo of the subject in uniform standing in front of a police cruiser would tell the tale.
what happens if you make facial recognition illegal but NSA or other government agencies still use it? How would you punish them? Change the director? Fire employees? Fine them or money cuts?
Like explicitly saying in the House of Commons that they propose to violate international law, because they have just realised there is a flaw with the international agreement that they themselves has signed only a few months earlier, after having won a general election specifically on the basis of signing that specific agreement, and angrily telling everyone that the agreement had been studied enough and was fine and that any attempt to delay was an act of treachery against the people rather than due diligence.
There's a conflict there, but generally the intelligence agencies try to avoid doing illegal things. They do morally wrong things, for sure, but finding a legal argument is difficult, because they try to operate within the law.
I mean, we have no idea what intelligence agencies "generally" do. What we do know is that the few things that have come out about their actions have been full of illegal things. So saying they generally don't do that isn't worth very much
We do have an idea of what intelligence agencies do. They collect intelligence. The FBI investigates domestic federal crimes, mostly child porn, domestic terrorism, and white collar crimes, among a lot of other things. The NSA has a more foreign directive and focuses on national security. The DEA focuses on the war on drugs.
A big problem I'm noticing everywhere is that, while we have access to all of this information on how the government works, no one exercises their access to that information before commenting on internet forums and spreading misinformation and doubt about our DEMOCRATIC institutions. Even if you don't elect the person who heads these agencies, you do elect the person who appoints those heads.
https://apnews.com/article/33a88feb083ea35515de3c73e3d854ad congress isn't sure what the nsa is doing, you will have a very hard time convincing me that the average American can know. We have broad overviews of their job directive, yes. And is this democratic to you, when they lie to congress? I don't believe it's very democratic anyway considering our first past the post system mandates only two political parties, and neither party has any interest in curbing the surveillance state.
If that's the evidence we have, that's the conviction they receive. It's pretty damning evidence. If an agency is willing to go that far, why give them the benefit of the doubt that was only thing that "got away from them"? Something like that only comes along when a systemic level of rules flaunting is prevalent.
What's illegal for you and me is not necessarily illegal for Them, apparently. It is illegal to lie to Congress, yet there goes James Clapper with no repercussions.
Yes, if someone in a trusted position of authority is caught doing something illegal they should be removed from that position and then charged with what ever crime it was they committed. Just like you and I would have done to us. Why is that even a question on your part?
I think the parent isn't actually questioning that someone in authority should or should not have the same repercussions, but rather rhetorically calling out, as you explicitly did, they often are held to a lower standard.
I guess what I was getting at is why make it rhetorical. There is not room for that in this regard. Allowing any wiggle room is how we got to where we are.
It’s questionable whether the police are the ‘oppressors’. Individual officers don’t have much power and aren’t members of the ruling class.
It’s also rarely the case that when there is a transfer of power, for the police to all be fired, which you’d think would be the case if they were the oppressors who had just been overthrown.
Doxxing police may be an effective strategy, but it’s also true that social media driven mobs end up killing people, sometimes in error.
Standing up against oppression is necessary, but it’s also messy, and nobody really smells of roses.
Let's take a market dynamics perspective. There are N number of financial contracts which 100xN market participants may choose to accept or bid their time on. The cost of vacating such a contract is substantial, as a career based on these contracts rarely transition to the family supporting careers one may need to replace it with, less an ambitious actor finds a suitable passion to replace it (common among LEOs is the practice of Law). So there exists a high cost to the participants to vacate these contracts and place them back on the market for bid.
The goal of fighting oppression this way is to drive the number of willing participants down and keep as many of those contracts open/unfulfilled. Quiting vacates 1.
However, given the high cost of such a decision, the desired benefit tends to be attained, as there is always sufficient numbers of willing participants to bid on those vacancies. Every year people graduate, separate from the military, migrate here.
Fighting labor market dynamics is unscalable. Changing labor markets via political mechanisms on the other hand is.
> Changing labor markets via political mechanisms on the other hand is.
Theoretically, sure. You're going to do this in Belarus, the most openly totalitarian state currently? The problem is that politically changing the dynamics is nigh impossible until the existing power structure is neutralized.
I'll agree that losing a living wage is a large difficulty, but reducing totalitarian oppression to market dynamics is callous, or biased. The larger situation demands action beyond rational choices.
This is vapid both-sides-ism of the worst kind. The election in Belarus is internationally recognized as illegitimate. The "winner" has long been known as "Europe's last dictator".
Don't equivocate between the people protesting for their votes to be counted and the people kidnapping and torturing them in response.
It’s obvious that some people are. It’s not obvious that it’s all that is going on. It’s also not obvious exactly what they are scared of.
For example, by all accounts Lukashenko is backed by Putin. It could be that people are less scared of the police, and more scared of what could happen if they overthrow Lukashenko, and Putin sends in little green men to restore order.
That’s just one example of what people might be considering. I’m guessing there are also a bunch of people who simply don’t have a clear idea of exactly what’s going on.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
peaceably: inclined or disposed to avoid strife or dissension; not argumentative or hostile:
assemble: gather together in one place for a common purpose.
> Where do you get the definition of "peaceably" from?
step 1: go to ddg
step 2: type "define peaceably"
step 3: hit "enter"
step 4: read the first or second definition in the results
step 5: ?????
step 6: profit
I don’t think dictionary.com was available to the framers of the US constitution, and I’m guessing that the Supreme Court would draw on some other sources too.
It’s interesting because the dictionary.com definition is very constrained.
Avoiding dissention, and not being ‘argumentative’ seem like a stretch for describing most peaceful protests in the US.
If we're talking about the definition at the time, this is what OED says:
> peaceably, adv.
> 2. Without being subject to disturbance or opposition; in peace, quietly; tranquilly, peacefully.
> 1375: Barbour Bruce v. 231 “It anoyis me.., That the clyffurd sa pesabilly Brukis and haldis the senȝory That suld be mine.”
> 1471: Fortescue Wks. (1869) 527 “Kynge Knoght kepte and occupied the same lande.., and died peasibly seased tharof.”
> 1593: Shakes. 2 Hen. VI, iii. iii. 25 “Disturbe him not, let him passe peaceably.”
> 1727: De Foe Syst. Magic i. iii. (1840) 71 “We come to desire your leave, that we may go peaceably, and do the duty of our worship.”
> 1824: Mackintosh Speech 15 June, “They saw the laws obeyed, justice administered,..and the revenue peaceably collected.”
> peaceably, adv.
> 1. With peaceful or friendly disposition, intention, or behaviour; amicably; so as to make for or maintain peace; without making strife, opposition, or disturbance; without quarrel or dispute.
> c1330: R. Brunne Chron. Wace (Rolls) 7300 “Ȝyf swylk be comen, & peysibly þe hauene han nomen, In pes lat þem take þer rest.”
> 1389: in Eng. Gilds (1870) 52 “Honestliche and peysiblyche to gon to þe forseyd chirch.”
> c1449: Pecock Repr. iii. xiii. (Rolls) 363 “Regniden in successioun euermore oon emperour after an other pesibili to gidere.”
> 1535: Coverdale Zach. viii. 16 “Execute iudgment truly and peaceably.”
> 1599: Shakes. Much Ado v. ii. 72 “Thou and I are too wise to wooe peaceablie.”
> 1599: Nashe Lenten Stuffe Wks. (Grosart) V. 228 “Not any where is..a warlike people peaceablier demeanourd.”
> 1709: Addison Tatler No. 96 2 “Good Subjects, that pay their Taxes, and live peaceably in their Habitations.”
> 1855: Macaulay Hist. Eng. xii. III. 190 “With assurances that the city should be peaceably surrendered.”
>peaceably, adv.
> 3. Comb.
> 1692: Wicked Contriv. Steph. Blackhead in Select. fr. Harl. Misc. (1793) 512 “Some other good and peaceably-minded man.”
> 1781: Cowper Conversation 90 “The clash of arguments and jar of words,..Divert the champions prodigal of breath, And put the peaceably-disposed to death.”
He asked where the gp got the definition, I gave him the steps to find that exact definition. I don't have a horse in this race, I was just providing the source for someone who cared enough to ask but not enough to do even a cursory search.
The parent's rather obvious point is that some police officers are bad, but police in general aren't behaving this way. If you disagree, then fine, but at least disagree with the parent and not some straw man of your own making.
To the comment of "Yes, the person who brings the baton down on your head is an oppressor." - bringing up 'well other police are not bad' is just itself a weird strawman.
It's not a straw man so much as a clarification, because the original assertion is ambiguous about whether we're talking literally about a single person or if "person bringing the baton down on your head" is a metaphor for police in general (especially given the surrounding context of talking about the police in a general, plural sense, and the fact that no one disputes that no one disputes that individual bad police officers should be held responsible).
Pretty much yes. Locals used to reply to bemused foreigners with "It's Belarus, baby" when questioned on police brutality and state-sanctioned killings.
In practice it turns out even worse. The people in command deny giving the orders, and the people hitting you with the stick say that they weren't given the proper support or tools. Everybody in the chain of command claims to be weak or hamstrung, yet you're the one on the ground bleeding.
True. But while I don't disagree that Police is often as culpable as the ruling class, I'm weary of these methods.
You don't doxx police officers and paste their IDs online. The chance you're taking, the certainty indeed, is that someone will follow through (perhaps even an agent provocateur) providing the justification for waves of ruthless revenge.
Nope, you bring your dossiers to a higher court and ask for Justice (EU, ICJ, UN.)
Edit: unless of course the situation has deteriorated so badly that the prospect of civil war with all its casualties and pain is on the table.
Have you noticed how ridiculously long it takes to get anything done by the institutional route, and how this is partly because reactionaries expend effort on undermining those very institutions (the US, for example, has gone from proposing the establishment of something like the ICJ, to refusing to take part in it, to threatening sanctions against it)?
> the US, for example, has gone from proposing the establishment of something like the ICJ, to refusing to take part in it, to threatening sanctions against it
You seem to be confusing the International Court of Justice (ICJ) with the International Criminal Court (ICC).
> Nope, you bring your dossiers to a higher court and ask for Justice (EU, ICJ, UN.)
The EU isn't a court, and European institutions (including European courts like the ECHR) are particularly not "higher courts" over police in the US. The ICJ hears only cases between state parties, not between states and their subjects, and the UN isn't a court at all, and, again, is only a forum for state parties, not for disputes between individuals and states, though sometimes you can get a state party to stand up for subjects of another state; but, that's not really much of a practical option if the offending state is the US, both because of its Security Council role (which Uniting for Peace, in theory, provides a route around through the General Assembly), and because of its hyperpower status (which means that there is, in practice, no way to enforce a decision against it, even if one was reached through UfP.)
Sure - but only if you picture an innocent peaceful protestor being smashed to the ground by a mindless thug of a police officer who loves his job and has no family and nothing to lose.
Clean or not, people need to be held accountable for their actions. I mean if they have nothing to hide then they have nothing to fear, right? These are supposed to be public servants (although that's obviously not the case).
So no, I still don't feel bad about it, even if that cop needs the job to feed his family. Maybe they should fight the system that doesn't support their citizens in need (people with health problems, people who don't have money for food, people who don't have homes) instead of being willing participants against those fighting for a better government that actually serves the needs of its people?
I agree with your premise of equality - that you can't have it both ways. My point was if the government uses that power against its people, the people should be able to use that power against their government.
However in this case it's actually different, as police officers are meant to be public servants.
I disagree. People paid by the public must be accountable to the public and all their (paid) actions should not be private. (Exceptions may apply to this general rule, though they are debatable)
What do you suggest to do here? Either you allow the oppressors to beat people and stay anonymous, not get punished or you create a community trying to deanonymize them with all the consequences.
If you can be sure that the protestors are all trying to make a better government for everyone, then I’d agree.
But that’s never the case. There is always a mixture of people with good motivations, people who just want to get into a fight. This is just as true for the protestors as it is for the police.
If it was so clear what was right, then it would be simple to overthrow the government since the vast majority of people would be in agreement.
So you believe the police should police themselves?
Honestly I'd prefer vigilante justice over that.
Dox the cops, 100%. I'd rather a cop be hurt unfairly in the line of duty than a protester fighting for what he believes in. This country was founded on overthrowing tyrrany. If the cops don't accept the risks of the job then they can quit. Cops need to be held to a higher standard, not lower or even equal. The government (and police) should fear the people, not the other way around.
The police need to be held accountable, full stop. The police need to be held to a higher standard than the people, full stop. Even if that means an angry mob it's still preferable to no accountability.
It's clean because the police should be held to higher standards than the public, and they can quit if they don't want that responsibility.
You're right - it's just you baiting people into this false dichotomy to make it seem like people are anti-police. I was just calling your bluff. I'll take an angry mob over lack of police accountability, and the police cannot police themselves so the public needs to do it by whatever means necessary even if that harms innocent police officers.
I will always choose the people over the police, even if the people are violent. A public mob is better than a police mob.
Until the police are held accountable to the public, I feel no remorse for anything that happens to them.
I’m not baiting people into anything, and you aren’t calling any bluff. You are free to engage in this dialog without using false dichotomies if you choose.
As to making people “seem like they are anti-police”, why would I need to do that? I don’t think people have a problem with being seen as anti-police. Is there something wrong with being anti-police? It seems like an entirely valid position to hold.
Being anti-police as an institution doesn’t automatically mean being in favor of mob violence against individuals. You can be strongly against a structure, without hating the individuals who occupy the role.
It is possible to want to hold the police accountable without believing that the only way to do this is to dehumanize them, or to doxx them.
All you have done here is double down on an extremist position.
“The police” is a very large and diverse group of people. You have said you feel no remorse for anything that happens to them.
You have said that you are willing to completely dehumanize all police, and support violence of any kind against all of them and the killing of innocent people in the name of your cause, which is an unspecified ‘accountability’.
You are therefore a politically violent extremist, or at the very least someone who supports politically violent extremism if such a distinction can be made.
Whatever you say dude. You're obviously trying to label everyone that disagrees with you as a violent extremist - you end every one of your comments like that. I don't know why you'd do that and I don't care it's just obvious and that's why everyone is downvoting you.
I’m labelling you a violent extremist, because you said you don’t care if innocent people die as a result of your cause. I’m not sure why you think I’m labeling anyone else.
Can you find one other comment where I have labeled anyone anything? It should be very easy if I end every one of my comments like that.
Nobody else here has said they don’t care about innocent people dying. That is only you.
Nope, it does happen exactly like you described. The repression of Genova G8 by the Italian riot police and the Carabinieri was an example of "lovin' it".
Some of the participants in the brutalities called it a "mexican slaughterhouse" and several trials came to the conclusion that massive human rights violations have occurred.
Unfortunately the commanding officers have been promoted for not maintaining order and not exercising the authority over their men that their role demanded. They too loved it though and throughout.
At least for the case of Belarus discussed here I see no other possibility, because the oppressors hide their faces and do not present any identification.
#1 is a link to another place where you don’t answer the same question.
#2 if you can identity the police using ML, then you can use those identities for any legitimate purpose that a badge number would be used for, such as collecting evidence against them, and clearly doxxing is not the only thing you can do.
I have seen video of similar (arguably worse) behavior from police in the US.
I’ve also personally witnessed a policeman on horseback in the UK striking a peaceful and stationary protester in the head with a baton resulting in profuse bleeding.
If it’s true in Belarus, then it’s also true in the UK, and US.
But, what isn’t clear is that a Telegram group doxxing officers is a clean way to deal with it.
How do we know which officers were doxxed and for what reason? How do we know what will happen to them? Would you feel comfortable if the officer in your video was killed?
When? Your approach is to limit political autonomy to zero and offer an institutional solution that will probably not be available. What if the compilation or possession of such a dossier is treated as evidence of conspiracy to commit sedition?
Doxxing might well be used as evidence of a conspiracy to commit sedition, but by distributing the information widely it's strategically superior to holding it in isolation. It's easy to act with impunity against a lone individual, but if some unknown number of people are possession of the same information the marginal benefit of arrest is vastly reduced.
“Your approach is to limit political autonomy to zero and offer an institutional solution that will probably not be available.”
That is a straw man argument, undeniably so. It in no way represents my position.
I agree with you distributing information widely is superior to holding it in isolation, and I agree with you about reducing the benefit of arrest. Nobody said anything about just one person holding all the dossiers.
There are many ways to accomplish this which are not doxxing if the goal is real accountability.
Then there's the possibility that all the honest officers who don't want to follow those orders quit or strike or otherwise refuse to report to work to do these things.
When the oppressor only has the truly pathological cases to support them, it's a lot easier to know who to fight.
I know, the 'good' officers can be leveraged, hostaged, or any number of other coercive ways to make them do what the oppressor wants.
And I don't generally agree with the 'stay in the system and help fix it from within'. When you're having to take crappy orders from above, your only recourse is mutiny or other disobedience and it's a lot harder to manage in an already corrupt chain.
> Then there's the possibility that all the honest officers who don't want to follow those orders quit or strike or otherwise refuse to report to work to do these things.
No it's not, not generally. When the police goes away, in a lot of places, society falls apart because the vicious prey on the rest without hesitation. Especially the good cops don't want that, because they're in it to serve and protect. "I'll just not go, lol" equals "some drug lord will take over the city and rape and pillage with impunity". They don't want that, and the super majority of citizens also doesn't want that.
Seems like one of those phrases you only hear someone say offhandedly, and might not actually see written down. I can totally understand how it could be easy to mishear it somewhere along the chain of people who heard it from other people.
No, then you get used to applying the pronunciations of word fragments from one word to another. Reading doesn't make you pronounce things wrong. Not reading does. It's why so many people on YouTube embarrass themselves by confidently getting certain words hilariously wrong.
How many American children grew up reading Harry Potter pronouncing Hermione as "Hermi-Own" until the movies came out?
Is this common? I can't say that I know a lot of children, but the ones I do know had no problem with it. I know because one named a stuffed animal after her, and another asked her mother if she could change her own name to Herminoe.
Maybe it's time to reuse the old argument but now in the opposite direction:
"If the police is not doing anything wrong, they have nothing to fear."