Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
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I think that ultimately it has to be something done from the bottom up. Win local races. Implement good, progressive policy. Make peoples’ lives safer. You can do all that at the city level. Then having built the ground work, you can elect state wide leaders that think the same way, and who have the experience from local government to get things done. Now you have a coalition of voters that are bought into your vision. It is hard work and a lot of it is thankless, but is the most enduring way to effect change that you want.
On July 13 2023 08:04 ChristianS wrote: @Mohdoo: I mean, I’ve got my complaints about the FDA myself. But my point was more about the idea of *creating* a regulatory framework in the first place, going back to like 1906. That was something where as a government it was possible to look at an unregulated market like drugs, with a lot of cutting edge scientific questions around what a regulatory framework would even mean, and go ahead and build one anyway. It’s unfathomable to me that we could do something like that today (e.g. with unregulated markets like social media or AI).
That the existing regulatory frameworks are becoming increasingly inadequate too is only further evidence of the institutional decay I’m trying to describe.
@GH: Come on now, I’m not insisting that anyone “tolerate the increasing deprivation of their rights indefinitely.” If you or anybody else has a plan to get those rights back I’m eager to hear it. Saying “letting Republicans get elected will demonstrably make this problem worse, not better” is not explicitly or implicitly saying that anybody should tolerate it a second longer than they have to.
If you’ve got a way that *not* voting for the person with a D by their name would give those rights back, I’m very interested to hear how that works. Otherwise, filling out a ballot only takes part of a day every couple years. Why can’t we spend the other 364 days working on non-electoral solutions, without ceding control of government to fascists?
It very much reads that you are to me.
You already know the ideas/plans I relate to are rooted in revolutionary socialism. I've given plenty of recommendations for further reading/understanding of what that means to me over the years. I welcome sincere and serious engagement on anything I've recommended or other relevant socialist perspectives.
To be specific, it's a disagreement about how long and under what conditions "they have to", hence the reference to Dr. King's white moderate quote about paternalistically setting the timetable for other peoples' freedom. This isn't a new argument and the decades following Dr. King calling it out so poignantly have thoroughly shown its futility imo.
You used the euphemistic "transformational change" for revolution but this is where this conversation always ends up for social democrats.
The acceptance that the US probably needs "transformational change", recognizing that the politicians in power (including Democrats) will never allow those changes, and then the realization they have no plan beyond continuing to vote to keep those politicians in power to (hopefully at best) slow down the march toward full blown fascism with maybe some futile support for bastardized socialist policy/strategies sprinkled in. That wouldn't be as egregious if they didn't simultaneously dismiss the progenitors of the socialist/anarchist policies/strategies they bastardize to conform to the Democrat party framework and provide the superficial appearance of solidarity while undermining revolutionary energy.
There are so many rotten funaments, it's exhausting just thinking about changing it all. It's the same thing with corporations, and they're orders of magnitude less complex than society. You have years upon years of building upon some rulebook. The rulebook becomes anitquated, but they won't spend time and money seriously reforming that rulebook because that would mean shooting themselves in the foot (or sometimes both feet or sometimes even the head) so they won't even consider it. They rather patch it up ad perpetuum with temporary bandaids hoping they can chug along for another few business cycles. And then they have to patch again.
My point is - this kind of changed into a game development analogy so let's roll with it - that it's kind of a no go that people will change the source code from the ground up for an existing game. They rather build an entirely new game and then hope that new game has source code written well enough and has fun mechanics that it can attract a big enough player base to be relevant. People rather patch the bugs and glitches out and when that creates new issues, they'll patch those.
On July 13 2023 12:56 gobbledydook wrote: I think that ultimately it has to be something done from the bottom up. Win local races. Implement good, progressive policy. Make peoples’ lives safer. You can do all that at the city level. Then having built the ground work, you can elect state wide leaders that think the same way, and who have the experience from local government to get things done. Now you have a coalition of voters that are bought into your vision. It is hard work and a lot of it is thankless, but is the most enduring way to effect change that you want.
While I (and most socialist/anarchist frameworks) generally agree with the sentiment, it's important to note that about 1/3 of state budgets comes from the federal government. This is leverage. One of the more famous examples being the highways and drinking age bargain. But that sort of leverage can just as easily be used to kill the kind of policy and undermine the kind of local officials you're describing.
What I'd like to emphasize is that this "I think we need to..." stuff doesn't have to come from a place of a sort of epiphany of ignorance. Meaning just because many of us have more recently realized no amount of electoralism can get us where we need to be (just to mitigate ecological catastrophe, not even actually realize an egalitarian society) doesn't mean we're the first or that the space is unexplored by others.
There were people 100+ years ago saying basically what you just said, while telling our ancestors this "electoralism isn't going to cut it"/"transformational change is needed" thing was apparent then and would be the realization people like us eventually reach many decades later. They've been working on the "I think we need to..." stuff the whole time (despite being ostracized/imprisoned/sometimes outright hunted down and murdered by the government, including by Democrats). People don't need to agree with everything they said/did (if for no other reason than there are multiple perspectives with different, though generally overlapping, theories of change) but they also don't need to approach this stuff like there isn't over 100 years worth of study and work from practically every walk of life on this stuff.
So if people agree that transformational change is necessary. that electoralism is grossly insufficient to get it, and we need to pursue at least a supplementary if not outright different strategy, then the least they can do isn't vote for Democrats, it's enthusiastically engage with the work of people over the last 100+ years that already knew that. Ideally, before they obliviously repeat them with no awareness of what was learned from the multiple generations of comrades that explored and worked through such ideas under a variety of conditions.
Put simply, basically all the best stuff you'll find from social democrats in the US (this goes back to the New Deal) are bastardized/coopted socialist ideas they had to be dragged to by socialists and the fear of catastrophic social unrest (unrest encouraged and led frequently at the local level by socialists while being dismissed and derided by Democrats with the civil rights movement as another example)
So if Democrats are going to do anything actually helpful (nonreformist reform) it'll be because socialists dragged them to it and to stave off impending catastrophic (to the status quo) social unrest led by socialists.
To borrow a turn of phrase from ChristianS, if we really care about remedying the oppressive nature of US society we need to be the socialists doing the dragging not the Democrats digging in our heels.
If I could choose between democrats behaving as they currently do, or angry tweens, I would not hesitate to choose angry tweens. I am seeing no evidence of republican dysfunction being a net negative to achieving their goals.
Then I’m not sure you’re looking that hard? They’ve run a fair number of Christine O’Donnell-like candidates over the years that definitely cost them seats. Also, voted for a fair number of policies like the Obamacare-repeal-that-didn’t-even-repeal-Obamacare that cost them seats, too.
I don’t quite get how you arrived at the conclusion that an organization full of infighting and backstabbing is equally effective at achieving its goals as a well-aligned and coordinated one. I’m not a “everybody fall in line and support the party no matter what” guy, but the advantages of getting on the same page seem pretty self-evident.
Are you saying democrats have achieved more in the last 8 years than republicans have?
No, but come on, justify what you’re saying. I’m not even convinced “Democrats have been more unified as a party in the last 8 years” is anywhere close to true. “Democrats in disarray” has become a meme, meanwhile the defining narrative of the Trump era was “surely *this* offense is will be what makes Republicans turn against him. No? Ah, well, nevertheless…” over and over and over.
I don’t have a worked out theory of when it’s right to stand by your precise principles and when it’s right to set aside your differences to form a coalition, but all you’re offering right now is “infighting is good, actually,” with no supporting evidence whatsoever. I mean I don’t actually care about MTG and Boebert fighting, and I don’t think voters particularly do either, but “acting like angry tweens is effective politics” is a pretty hot take, dude.
Beyond the usefulness of infighting vs falling in line I think the bottom line is that there are more effective strategies than Democrats are utilizing currently, one of those strategies (and perhaps most importantly,) is the one Republicans are using.
Though I think this general perspective underplays how much things like keeping wages down and workers desperate, while contrary to much of Democrat rhetoric, is ultimately the outcome their donors are paying for.
I’m not actually sure what the bolded is referring to. Capturing SCOTUS? It feels like I missed some context here.
No particular disagreement on your second paragraph. + Show Spoiler +
I’m generally skeptical that there’s an explicit buy-off happening (idk if you’d claim there is); but I certainly think systemic factors (yes, including wealthy donors) make it pretty much political suicide to try to institute major changes, even popular ones. And a major factor stabilizing that equilibrium is that workers are working too much and too worried about survival to have time and energy for political education and advocacy.
That'd be an example of an unmatched Republican win that Democrats don't even have an inkling of a strategy to match/surpass for decades, if ever (assuming Democrat ineptitude is genuine).
I mean sure, it was never really a secret that getting 6 seats on SCOTUS would be extremely effective and difficult to undo. You’ll recall this often being cited as one of the more important reasons everybody should still vote Hillary despite their reservations. But Trump won, seats captured, we’re here now.
But what’s your point? Knowing you I’d guess you want to argue in a direction like “If Democrats can’t undo overturning Roe, then why should people bother voting for them?” But if you actually cared about pro-choice, and you were now looking at two parties, one of which would like to keep abortion legal, and the other can and will ban it anywhere they get the chance (including federally), why the fuck would your response be “oh, I guess elections don’t matter any more”?
I think I’ve said before that I see voting for Democrats more as damage limitation than as The Path To Fixing Everything. That, I think, would take quite a bit more than just filling out a ballot every couple years. But damage limitation still has a pretty enormous effect on the amount of unnecessary suffering inflicted on actual humans.
I suppose there's a few.
People have convinced themselves for/by one reason or another that the US isn't the dystopian police state plasmid mentioned because it hasn't set its sights on them...yet (or it's not literally 1940's Nazi Germany). So they insist the only rational action for the groups of people they are actively coming for is to keep listening to the perpetual Democrat hold music and mindlessly voting Democrat. Oh and don't dare say Biden/Democrats piss poor performance isn't good enough, we gotta be obsequiously thankful and boisterously supportive (despite actually losing rights) or else their persistent incompetence/incapacity/unwillingness to act is blamed on us for "selfishly" demanding rights and doing so in ways that Democrats insist aren't "pragmatic" (while Democrats "paternalistically believe they can set the timetable for other peoples' freedom").
and
it does make me concerned about even the "best case scenario" where Democrats win the house, senate, and presidency and the Republican party implodes as a national party.
They aren't going to be replaced with a more moderate party, and Democrats will enthusiastically welcome an even more ghoulish opposition to run against to lower the expectations for themselves rather than lift up a party to their left and displace the Republican party. Then it's just a matter of time before you get someone with all the ghoulish intentions combined with just the right seemingly innocuous rhetoric/charisma (Trump demonstrates it's actually a pretty wide runway to hit) to mask them enough for centrists to turn a blind eye, and that's all she wrote.
As it sits it'll probably be a coinflip on whether Trump is the next president (how do you still pretend you live in a "nation of laws" after that really?) and Trump's party might just take power and never let it go.
Another point would be that by Democrat supporters own reasoning voting for Democrats isn't a viable solution but a (counterproductive imo) salve for their own conscience.
Lenin is certainly an important reference for What is to be Done but as Mohdoo pointed out earlier, Fanon and others have built on those ideas, and I believe we'll need all their work and then some. EDIT:
Christians: I tend to look at non-governmental solutions (stuff like unions and mutual aid) as promising alternative routes
Revolutionary socialists are supporters of unions and mutual aid orgs, also they have some important insight into how they've developed over the 100 or so years they've been working together.
What does "the US is a dystopian police-state" even mean? How do you define police state? Best I can tell the laws are barely being enforced where I live. You can go out on the street and deal drugs or shoot up and nobody cares. You can walk into a store and fill your arms with product and walk out and nobody will stop you. Hell, I've stopped obeying some red lights at traffic intersections if I've determined it's safe to proceed. Why should I follow the rules if nobody else is going to?
Is this what a police state looks like to you
Just casually using a blowtorch in daylight hours on a busy street to break into locked product then filling up your bags and walking out of the store? Although I'll give you the "dystopian" part for sure. The fact that stores have taken it upon themselves to lock up entire aisles of shampoo and shaving cream to prevent shoplifting because our laws are so poorly enforced definitely counts as dystopian in my book. Unfortunately this is happening most in progressive cities like Portland, New York, San Francisco, etc. so I think the scenario where everything goes tits up leading to a revolution is not going to be in the direction you're hoping for.
An individual using an unusual shoplifting method doesn't have literally anything to do with the argument of a police state. In fact in a police state the police is often incentivized to ignore citizens calling for help. Case in point: Uvalde school shooting.
"The United States has militarized police, sophisticated surveillance, and also ordinary citizens with little say in what goes on. Thus, the US has all the trappings of an all-powerful police state. A Police State is a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens’ activities."
"So is the US a totalitarian state? No. It’s an inverted totalitarian state. Corporations control the government through political contributions and lobbying. The persistent political apathy allows leaders to do what they want."
"Over the last 25 years, civilian law enforcement has been increasingly militarized in America. For example, there has been a 4000% increase in no-knock, military-armed SWAT raids over the past 30 years."
"We also have the world’s most extensive prison system. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Over the last 40 years, the US prison population has risen by 700%"
Also, the opposite of a police state doesn't make for better policing, it's just the opposite extreme. Ideally police would work with and for the population, not against it. That would be the happy medium.
In my life I've probably seen several hundred cases of police brutality in the US, and that's only what's been caught on camera. Police showing up at innocent people's homes unannounced, sometimes it results in them shooting the owner to death. This kind of invasive entering of property by police is fairly normal in the US. Or non-resisting individuals getting beaten by several police officers, sometimes to death. I've seen a number of cases being caught on camera, one time it was a homeless man, another time someone fleeing a crime scene. Or individuals being pushed to the ground so that they can't breathe anymore. This happens so often that medics get calls about this quite frequently. It has resulted in death a number of times. George Floyd was not the first one, and he won't be the last one. And they do this to everyone, every community. Black, white, hispanic, any of them. And they get off with a slap on the wrist. That's one of the hallmarks of a police state. In a police state, they're not being held accountable for their actions.
A police state also doesn't mean that all police officers do a bad job, or turn a blind eye, or that they all threaten the populace. It's not required for all police officers to be bad. If just enough of them get away with being horrible officers that people have reason to be afraid of them rather than seeing eye-to-eye with them, that's enough to have an authoritarian grip on people. The fear comes from the uncertainty. The law is supposed to weed out bad cops. In the US this is not happening frequently enough. I've seen very rare instances of police actually arresting other officers for misconduct, even though it should be happening almost all the time.
Remember when you said "we should be seeing this be caught on camera all the time if it were a widespread problem"? You said this about transgender people facing discrimination and violence. Maybe you should listen to your own words. We have far too much camera footage of police misconduct in the US. You can't deny it.
On July 12 2023 11:26 ChristianS wrote: [quote] Then I’m not sure you’re looking that hard? They’ve run a fair number of Christine O’Donnell-like candidates over the years that definitely cost them seats. Also, voted for a fair number of policies like the Obamacare-repeal-that-didn’t-even-repeal-Obamacare that cost them seats, too.
I don’t quite get how you arrived at the conclusion that an organization full of infighting and backstabbing is equally effective at achieving its goals as a well-aligned and coordinated one. I’m not a “everybody fall in line and support the party no matter what” guy, but the advantages of getting on the same page seem pretty self-evident.
Are you saying democrats have achieved more in the last 8 years than republicans have?
No, but come on, justify what you’re saying. I’m not even convinced “Democrats have been more unified as a party in the last 8 years” is anywhere close to true. “Democrats in disarray” has become a meme, meanwhile the defining narrative of the Trump era was “surely *this* offense is will be what makes Republicans turn against him. No? Ah, well, nevertheless…” over and over and over.
I don’t have a worked out theory of when it’s right to stand by your precise principles and when it’s right to set aside your differences to form a coalition, but all you’re offering right now is “infighting is good, actually,” with no supporting evidence whatsoever. I mean I don’t actually care about MTG and Boebert fighting, and I don’t think voters particularly do either, but “acting like angry tweens is effective politics” is a pretty hot take, dude.
Beyond the usefulness of infighting vs falling in line I think the bottom line is that there are more effective strategies than Democrats are utilizing currently, one of those strategies (and perhaps most importantly,) is the one Republicans are using.
Though I think this general perspective underplays how much things like keeping wages down and workers desperate, while contrary to much of Democrat rhetoric, is ultimately the outcome their donors are paying for.
I’m not actually sure what the bolded is referring to. Capturing SCOTUS? It feels like I missed some context here.
No particular disagreement on your second paragraph. + Show Spoiler +
I’m generally skeptical that there’s an explicit buy-off happening (idk if you’d claim there is); but I certainly think systemic factors (yes, including wealthy donors) make it pretty much political suicide to try to institute major changes, even popular ones. And a major factor stabilizing that equilibrium is that workers are working too much and too worried about survival to have time and energy for political education and advocacy.
That'd be an example of an unmatched Republican win that Democrats don't even have an inkling of a strategy to match/surpass for decades, if ever (assuming Democrat ineptitude is genuine).
I mean sure, it was never really a secret that getting 6 seats on SCOTUS would be extremely effective and difficult to undo. You’ll recall this often being cited as one of the more important reasons everybody should still vote Hillary despite their reservations. But Trump won, seats captured, we’re here now.
But what’s your point? Knowing you I’d guess you want to argue in a direction like “If Democrats can’t undo overturning Roe, then why should people bother voting for them?” But if you actually cared about pro-choice, and you were now looking at two parties, one of which would like to keep abortion legal, and the other can and will ban it anywhere they get the chance (including federally), why the fuck would your response be “oh, I guess elections don’t matter any more”?
I think I’ve said before that I see voting for Democrats more as damage limitation than as The Path To Fixing Everything. That, I think, would take quite a bit more than just filling out a ballot every couple years. But damage limitation still has a pretty enormous effect on the amount of unnecessary suffering inflicted on actual humans.
I suppose there's a few.
People have convinced themselves for/by one reason or another that the US isn't the dystopian police state plasmid mentioned because it hasn't set its sights on them...yet (or it's not literally 1940's Nazi Germany). So they insist the only rational action for the groups of people they are actively coming for is to keep listening to the perpetual Democrat hold music and mindlessly voting Democrat. Oh and don't dare say Biden/Democrats piss poor performance isn't good enough, we gotta be obsequiously thankful and boisterously supportive (despite actually losing rights) or else their persistent incompetence/incapacity/unwillingness to act is blamed on us for "selfishly" demanding rights and doing so in ways that Democrats insist aren't "pragmatic" (while Democrats "paternalistically believe they can set the timetable for other peoples' freedom").
and
it does make me concerned about even the "best case scenario" where Democrats win the house, senate, and presidency and the Republican party implodes as a national party.
They aren't going to be replaced with a more moderate party, and Democrats will enthusiastically welcome an even more ghoulish opposition to run against to lower the expectations for themselves rather than lift up a party to their left and displace the Republican party. Then it's just a matter of time before you get someone with all the ghoulish intentions combined with just the right seemingly innocuous rhetoric/charisma (Trump demonstrates it's actually a pretty wide runway to hit) to mask them enough for centrists to turn a blind eye, and that's all she wrote.
As it sits it'll probably be a coinflip on whether Trump is the next president (how do you still pretend you live in a "nation of laws" after that really?) and Trump's party might just take power and never let it go.
Another point would be that by Democrat supporters own reasoning voting for Democrats isn't a viable solution but a (counterproductive imo) salve for their own conscience.
Lenin is certainly an important reference for What is to be Done but as Mohdoo pointed out earlier, Fanon and others have built on those ideas, and I believe we'll need all their work and then some. EDIT:
Christians: I tend to look at non-governmental solutions (stuff like unions and mutual aid) as promising alternative routes
Revolutionary socialists are supporters of unions and mutual aid orgs, also they have some important insight into how they've developed over the 100 or so years they've been working together.
What does "the US is a dystopian police-state" even mean? How do you define police state? Best I can tell the laws are barely being enforced where I live. You can go out on the street and deal drugs or shoot up and nobody cares. You can walk into a store and fill your arms with product and walk out and nobody will stop you. Hell, I've stopped obeying some red lights at traffic intersections if I've determined it's safe to proceed. Why should I follow the rules if nobody else is going to?
Just casually using a blowtorch in daylight hours on a busy street to break into locked product then filling up your bags and walking out of the store? Although I'll give you the "dystopian" part for sure. The fact that stores have taken it upon themselves to lock up entire aisles of shampoo and shaving cream to prevent shoplifting because our laws are so poorly enforced definitely counts as dystopian in my book. Unfortunately this is happening most in progressive cities like Portland, New York, San Francisco, etc. so I think the scenario where everything goes tits up leading to a revolution is not going to be in the direction you're hoping for.
An individual using an unusual shoplifting method doesn't have literally anything to do with the argument of a police state. In fact in a police state the police is often incentivized to ignore citizens calling for help. Case in point: Uvalde school shooting.
"The United States has militarized police, sophisticated surveillance, and also ordinary citizens with little say in what goes on. Thus, the US has all the trappings of an all-powerful police state. A Police State is a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens’ activities."
"So is the US a totalitarian state? No. It’s an inverted totalitarian state. Corporations control the government through political contributions and lobbying. The persistent political apathy allows leaders to do what they want."
"Over the last 25 years, civilian law enforcement has been increasingly militarized in America. For example, there has been a 4000% increase in no-knock, military-armed SWAT raids over the past 30 years."
"We also have the world’s most extensive prison system. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Over the last 40 years, the US prison population has risen by 700%"
Also, the opposite of a police state doesn't make for better policing, it's just the opposite extreme. Ideally police would work with and for the population, not against it. That would be the happy medium.
In my life I've probably seen several hundred cases of police brutality in the US, and that's only what's been caught on camera. Police showing up at innocent people's homes unannounced, sometimes it results in them shooting the owner to death. This kind of invasive entering of property by police is fairly normal in the US. Or non-resisting individuals getting beaten by several police officers, sometimes to death. I've seen a number of cases being caught on camera, one time it was a homeless man, another time someone fleeing a crime scene. Or individuals being pushed to the ground so that they can't breathe anymore. This happens so often that medics get calls about this quite frequently. It has resulted in death a number of times. George Floyd was not the first one, and he won't be the last one. And they do this to everyone, every community. Black, white, hispanic, any of them. And they get off with a slap on the wrist. That's one of the hallmarks of a police state. In a police state, they're not being held accountable for their actions.
A police state also doesn't mean that all police officers do a bad job, or turn a blind eye, or that they all threaten the populace. It's not required for all police officers to be bad. If just enough of them get away with being horrible officers that people have reason to be afraid of them rather than seeing eye-to-eye with them, that's enough to have an authoritarian grip on people. The fear comes from the uncertainty. The law is supposed to weed out bad cops. In the US this is not happening frequently enough. I've seen very rare instances of police actually arresting other officers for misconduct, even though it should be happening almost all the time.
Remember when you said "we should be seeing this be caught on camera all the time if it were a widespread problem"? You said this about transgender people facing discrimination and violence. Maybe you should listen to your own words. We have far too much camera footage of police misconduct in the US. You can't deny it.
I don't know what that website you're quoting from is besides being the first thing that pops up when you google "The US is a police state." Your post mostly reads as someone whose perspective of what it's like to live in the United States comes from the online content you consume. If this happened as frequently as you say then George Floyd would have been a forgotten statistic and not one of the most widely known persons in the world in 2020.
Are you saying democrats have achieved more in the last 8 years than republicans have?
No, but come on, justify what you’re saying. I’m not even convinced “Democrats have been more unified as a party in the last 8 years” is anywhere close to true. “Democrats in disarray” has become a meme, meanwhile the defining narrative of the Trump era was “surely *this* offense is will be what makes Republicans turn against him. No? Ah, well, nevertheless…” over and over and over.
I don’t have a worked out theory of when it’s right to stand by your precise principles and when it’s right to set aside your differences to form a coalition, but all you’re offering right now is “infighting is good, actually,” with no supporting evidence whatsoever. I mean I don’t actually care about MTG and Boebert fighting, and I don’t think voters particularly do either, but “acting like angry tweens is effective politics” is a pretty hot take, dude.
Beyond the usefulness of infighting vs falling in line I think the bottom line is that there are more effective strategies than Democrats are utilizing currently, one of those strategies (and perhaps most importantly,) is the one Republicans are using.
Though I think this general perspective underplays how much things like keeping wages down and workers desperate, while contrary to much of Democrat rhetoric, is ultimately the outcome their donors are paying for.
I’m not actually sure what the bolded is referring to. Capturing SCOTUS? It feels like I missed some context here.
No particular disagreement on your second paragraph. + Show Spoiler +
I’m generally skeptical that there’s an explicit buy-off happening (idk if you’d claim there is); but I certainly think systemic factors (yes, including wealthy donors) make it pretty much political suicide to try to institute major changes, even popular ones. And a major factor stabilizing that equilibrium is that workers are working too much and too worried about survival to have time and energy for political education and advocacy.
That'd be an example of an unmatched Republican win that Democrats don't even have an inkling of a strategy to match/surpass for decades, if ever (assuming Democrat ineptitude is genuine).
I mean sure, it was never really a secret that getting 6 seats on SCOTUS would be extremely effective and difficult to undo. You’ll recall this often being cited as one of the more important reasons everybody should still vote Hillary despite their reservations. But Trump won, seats captured, we’re here now.
But what’s your point? Knowing you I’d guess you want to argue in a direction like “If Democrats can’t undo overturning Roe, then why should people bother voting for them?” But if you actually cared about pro-choice, and you were now looking at two parties, one of which would like to keep abortion legal, and the other can and will ban it anywhere they get the chance (including federally), why the fuck would your response be “oh, I guess elections don’t matter any more”?
I think I’ve said before that I see voting for Democrats more as damage limitation than as The Path To Fixing Everything. That, I think, would take quite a bit more than just filling out a ballot every couple years. But damage limitation still has a pretty enormous effect on the amount of unnecessary suffering inflicted on actual humans.
I suppose there's a few.
People have convinced themselves for/by one reason or another that the US isn't the dystopian police state plasmid mentioned because it hasn't set its sights on them...yet (or it's not literally 1940's Nazi Germany). So they insist the only rational action for the groups of people they are actively coming for is to keep listening to the perpetual Democrat hold music and mindlessly voting Democrat. Oh and don't dare say Biden/Democrats piss poor performance isn't good enough, we gotta be obsequiously thankful and boisterously supportive (despite actually losing rights) or else their persistent incompetence/incapacity/unwillingness to act is blamed on us for "selfishly" demanding rights and doing so in ways that Democrats insist aren't "pragmatic" (while Democrats "paternalistically believe they can set the timetable for other peoples' freedom").
and
it does make me concerned about even the "best case scenario" where Democrats win the house, senate, and presidency and the Republican party implodes as a national party.
They aren't going to be replaced with a more moderate party, and Democrats will enthusiastically welcome an even more ghoulish opposition to run against to lower the expectations for themselves rather than lift up a party to their left and displace the Republican party. Then it's just a matter of time before you get someone with all the ghoulish intentions combined with just the right seemingly innocuous rhetoric/charisma (Trump demonstrates it's actually a pretty wide runway to hit) to mask them enough for centrists to turn a blind eye, and that's all she wrote.
As it sits it'll probably be a coinflip on whether Trump is the next president (how do you still pretend you live in a "nation of laws" after that really?) and Trump's party might just take power and never let it go.
Another point would be that by Democrat supporters own reasoning voting for Democrats isn't a viable solution but a (counterproductive imo) salve for their own conscience.
Lenin is certainly an important reference for What is to be Done but as Mohdoo pointed out earlier, Fanon and others have built on those ideas, and I believe we'll need all their work and then some. EDIT:
Christians: I tend to look at non-governmental solutions (stuff like unions and mutual aid) as promising alternative routes
Revolutionary socialists are supporters of unions and mutual aid orgs, also they have some important insight into how they've developed over the 100 or so years they've been working together.
What does "the US is a dystopian police-state" even mean? How do you define police state? Best I can tell the laws are barely being enforced where I live. You can go out on the street and deal drugs or shoot up and nobody cares. You can walk into a store and fill your arms with product and walk out and nobody will stop you. Hell, I've stopped obeying some red lights at traffic intersections if I've determined it's safe to proceed. Why should I follow the rules if nobody else is going to?
Just casually using a blowtorch in daylight hours on a busy street to break into locked product then filling up your bags and walking out of the store? Although I'll give you the "dystopian" part for sure. The fact that stores have taken it upon themselves to lock up entire aisles of shampoo and shaving cream to prevent shoplifting because our laws are so poorly enforced definitely counts as dystopian in my book. Unfortunately this is happening most in progressive cities like Portland, New York, San Francisco, etc. so I think the scenario where everything goes tits up leading to a revolution is not going to be in the direction you're hoping for.
An individual using an unusual shoplifting method doesn't have literally anything to do with the argument of a police state. In fact in a police state the police is often incentivized to ignore citizens calling for help. Case in point: Uvalde school shooting.
"The United States has militarized police, sophisticated surveillance, and also ordinary citizens with little say in what goes on. Thus, the US has all the trappings of an all-powerful police state. A Police State is a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens’ activities."
"So is the US a totalitarian state? No. It’s an inverted totalitarian state. Corporations control the government through political contributions and lobbying. The persistent political apathy allows leaders to do what they want."
"Over the last 25 years, civilian law enforcement has been increasingly militarized in America. For example, there has been a 4000% increase in no-knock, military-armed SWAT raids over the past 30 years."
"We also have the world’s most extensive prison system. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Over the last 40 years, the US prison population has risen by 700%"
Also, the opposite of a police state doesn't make for better policing, it's just the opposite extreme. Ideally police would work with and for the population, not against it. That would be the happy medium.
In my life I've probably seen several hundred cases of police brutality in the US, and that's only what's been caught on camera. Police showing up at innocent people's homes unannounced, sometimes it results in them shooting the owner to death. This kind of invasive entering of property by police is fairly normal in the US. Or non-resisting individuals getting beaten by several police officers, sometimes to death. I've seen a number of cases being caught on camera, one time it was a homeless man, another time someone fleeing a crime scene. Or individuals being pushed to the ground so that they can't breathe anymore. This happens so often that medics get calls about this quite frequently. It has resulted in death a number of times. George Floyd was not the first one, and he won't be the last one. And they do this to everyone, every community. Black, white, hispanic, any of them. And they get off with a slap on the wrist. That's one of the hallmarks of a police state. In a police state, they're not being held accountable for their actions.
A police state also doesn't mean that all police officers do a bad job, or turn a blind eye, or that they all threaten the populace. It's not required for all police officers to be bad. If just enough of them get away with being horrible officers that people have reason to be afraid of them rather than seeing eye-to-eye with them, that's enough to have an authoritarian grip on people. The fear comes from the uncertainty. The law is supposed to weed out bad cops. In the US this is not happening frequently enough. I've seen very rare instances of police actually arresting other officers for misconduct, even though it should be happening almost all the time.
Remember when you said "we should be seeing this be caught on camera all the time if it were a widespread problem"? You said this about transgender people facing discrimination and violence. Maybe you should listen to your own words. We have far too much camera footage of police misconduct in the US. You can't deny it.
I don't know what that website you're quoting from is besides being the first thing that pops up when you google "The US is a police state." Your post mostly reads as someone whose perspective of what it's like to live in the United States comes from the online content you consume. If this happened as frequently as you say then George Floyd would have been a forgotten statistic and not one of the most widely known persons in the world in 2020.
I mean, im sure theres some hyperbolic language but if you compare the US with france, germany and the UK there are something like 8, 30 and 60 times more people killed by police per capita. Cant find data for the whole of EU, but my quick glance leads me to believe it happens about 30 times as frequently. Obviously firearm culture is part of that reason, but police culture is, too.
Cellphone posting so too lazy to source things but there is plenty data showing that the US is a huge outlier compared with other wealthy western countries.
On July 12 2023 13:57 ChristianS wrote: [quote] No, but come on, justify what you’re saying. I’m not even convinced “Democrats have been more unified as a party in the last 8 years” is anywhere close to true. “Democrats in disarray” has become a meme, meanwhile the defining narrative of the Trump era was “surely *this* offense is will be what makes Republicans turn against him. No? Ah, well, nevertheless…” over and over and over.
I don’t have a worked out theory of when it’s right to stand by your precise principles and when it’s right to set aside your differences to form a coalition, but all you’re offering right now is “infighting is good, actually,” with no supporting evidence whatsoever. I mean I don’t actually care about MTG and Boebert fighting, and I don’t think voters particularly do either, but “acting like angry tweens is effective politics” is a pretty hot take, dude.
Beyond the usefulness of infighting vs falling in line I think the bottom line is that there are more effective strategies than Democrats are utilizing currently, one of those strategies (and perhaps most importantly,) is the one Republicans are using.
Though I think this general perspective underplays how much things like keeping wages down and workers desperate, while contrary to much of Democrat rhetoric, is ultimately the outcome their donors are paying for.
I’m not actually sure what the bolded is referring to. Capturing SCOTUS? It feels like I missed some context here.
No particular disagreement on your second paragraph. + Show Spoiler +
I’m generally skeptical that there’s an explicit buy-off happening (idk if you’d claim there is); but I certainly think systemic factors (yes, including wealthy donors) make it pretty much political suicide to try to institute major changes, even popular ones. And a major factor stabilizing that equilibrium is that workers are working too much and too worried about survival to have time and energy for political education and advocacy.
That'd be an example of an unmatched Republican win that Democrats don't even have an inkling of a strategy to match/surpass for decades, if ever (assuming Democrat ineptitude is genuine).
I mean sure, it was never really a secret that getting 6 seats on SCOTUS would be extremely effective and difficult to undo. You’ll recall this often being cited as one of the more important reasons everybody should still vote Hillary despite their reservations. But Trump won, seats captured, we’re here now.
But what’s your point? Knowing you I’d guess you want to argue in a direction like “If Democrats can’t undo overturning Roe, then why should people bother voting for them?” But if you actually cared about pro-choice, and you were now looking at two parties, one of which would like to keep abortion legal, and the other can and will ban it anywhere they get the chance (including federally), why the fuck would your response be “oh, I guess elections don’t matter any more”?
I think I’ve said before that I see voting for Democrats more as damage limitation than as The Path To Fixing Everything. That, I think, would take quite a bit more than just filling out a ballot every couple years. But damage limitation still has a pretty enormous effect on the amount of unnecessary suffering inflicted on actual humans.
I suppose there's a few.
People have convinced themselves for/by one reason or another that the US isn't the dystopian police state plasmid mentioned because it hasn't set its sights on them...yet (or it's not literally 1940's Nazi Germany). So they insist the only rational action for the groups of people they are actively coming for is to keep listening to the perpetual Democrat hold music and mindlessly voting Democrat. Oh and don't dare say Biden/Democrats piss poor performance isn't good enough, we gotta be obsequiously thankful and boisterously supportive (despite actually losing rights) or else their persistent incompetence/incapacity/unwillingness to act is blamed on us for "selfishly" demanding rights and doing so in ways that Democrats insist aren't "pragmatic" (while Democrats "paternalistically believe they can set the timetable for other peoples' freedom").
and
it does make me concerned about even the "best case scenario" where Democrats win the house, senate, and presidency and the Republican party implodes as a national party.
They aren't going to be replaced with a more moderate party, and Democrats will enthusiastically welcome an even more ghoulish opposition to run against to lower the expectations for themselves rather than lift up a party to their left and displace the Republican party. Then it's just a matter of time before you get someone with all the ghoulish intentions combined with just the right seemingly innocuous rhetoric/charisma (Trump demonstrates it's actually a pretty wide runway to hit) to mask them enough for centrists to turn a blind eye, and that's all she wrote.
As it sits it'll probably be a coinflip on whether Trump is the next president (how do you still pretend you live in a "nation of laws" after that really?) and Trump's party might just take power and never let it go.
Another point would be that by Democrat supporters own reasoning voting for Democrats isn't a viable solution but a (counterproductive imo) salve for their own conscience.
Lenin is certainly an important reference for What is to be Done but as Mohdoo pointed out earlier, Fanon and others have built on those ideas, and I believe we'll need all their work and then some. EDIT:
Christians: I tend to look at non-governmental solutions (stuff like unions and mutual aid) as promising alternative routes
Revolutionary socialists are supporters of unions and mutual aid orgs, also they have some important insight into how they've developed over the 100 or so years they've been working together.
What does "the US is a dystopian police-state" even mean? How do you define police state? Best I can tell the laws are barely being enforced where I live. You can go out on the street and deal drugs or shoot up and nobody cares. You can walk into a store and fill your arms with product and walk out and nobody will stop you. Hell, I've stopped obeying some red lights at traffic intersections if I've determined it's safe to proceed. Why should I follow the rules if nobody else is going to?
Just casually using a blowtorch in daylight hours on a busy street to break into locked product then filling up your bags and walking out of the store? Although I'll give you the "dystopian" part for sure. The fact that stores have taken it upon themselves to lock up entire aisles of shampoo and shaving cream to prevent shoplifting because our laws are so poorly enforced definitely counts as dystopian in my book. Unfortunately this is happening most in progressive cities like Portland, New York, San Francisco, etc. so I think the scenario where everything goes tits up leading to a revolution is not going to be in the direction you're hoping for.
An individual using an unusual shoplifting method doesn't have literally anything to do with the argument of a police state. In fact in a police state the police is often incentivized to ignore citizens calling for help. Case in point: Uvalde school shooting.
"The United States has militarized police, sophisticated surveillance, and also ordinary citizens with little say in what goes on. Thus, the US has all the trappings of an all-powerful police state. A Police State is a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens’ activities."
"So is the US a totalitarian state? No. It’s an inverted totalitarian state. Corporations control the government through political contributions and lobbying. The persistent political apathy allows leaders to do what they want."
"Over the last 25 years, civilian law enforcement has been increasingly militarized in America. For example, there has been a 4000% increase in no-knock, military-armed SWAT raids over the past 30 years."
"We also have the world’s most extensive prison system. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Over the last 40 years, the US prison population has risen by 700%"
Also, the opposite of a police state doesn't make for better policing, it's just the opposite extreme. Ideally police would work with and for the population, not against it. That would be the happy medium.
In my life I've probably seen several hundred cases of police brutality in the US, and that's only what's been caught on camera. Police showing up at innocent people's homes unannounced, sometimes it results in them shooting the owner to death. This kind of invasive entering of property by police is fairly normal in the US. Or non-resisting individuals getting beaten by several police officers, sometimes to death. I've seen a number of cases being caught on camera, one time it was a homeless man, another time someone fleeing a crime scene. Or individuals being pushed to the ground so that they can't breathe anymore. This happens so often that medics get calls about this quite frequently. It has resulted in death a number of times. George Floyd was not the first one, and he won't be the last one. And they do this to everyone, every community. Black, white, hispanic, any of them. And they get off with a slap on the wrist. That's one of the hallmarks of a police state. In a police state, they're not being held accountable for their actions.
A police state also doesn't mean that all police officers do a bad job, or turn a blind eye, or that they all threaten the populace. It's not required for all police officers to be bad. If just enough of them get away with being horrible officers that people have reason to be afraid of them rather than seeing eye-to-eye with them, that's enough to have an authoritarian grip on people. The fear comes from the uncertainty. The law is supposed to weed out bad cops. In the US this is not happening frequently enough. I've seen very rare instances of police actually arresting other officers for misconduct, even though it should be happening almost all the time.
Remember when you said "we should be seeing this be caught on camera all the time if it were a widespread problem"? You said this about transgender people facing discrimination and violence. Maybe you should listen to your own words. We have far too much camera footage of police misconduct in the US. You can't deny it.
I don't know what that website you're quoting from is besides being the first thing that pops up when you google "The US is a police state." Your post mostly reads as someone whose perspective of what it's like to live in the United States comes from the online content you consume. If this happened as frequently as you say then George Floyd would have been a forgotten statistic and not one of the most widely known persons in the world in 2020.
Any actual arguments or is that all?
I don’t have a good counter for “I’ve seen a lot of police brutality videos on the internet”
On July 13 2023 19:34 Liquid`Drone wrote: I mean, im sure theres some hyperbolic language but if you compare the US with france, germany and the UK there are something like 8, 30 and 60 times more people killed by police per capita. Cant find data for the whole of EU, but my quick glance leads me to believe it happens about 30 times as frequently. Obviously firearm culture is part of that reason, but police culture is, too.
Cellphone posting so too lazy to source things but there is plenty data showing that the US is a huge outlier compared with other wealthy western countries.
I’m on a cell phone too but I’m going to bet that the number of officers shot at with guns is also 8, 30, 60 times higher in the US than in France, Germany and the UK
On July 12 2023 14:12 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
Beyond the usefulness of infighting vs falling in line I think the bottom line is that there are more effective strategies than Democrats are utilizing currently, one of those strategies (and perhaps most importantly,) is the one Republicans are using.
Though I think this general perspective underplays how much things like keeping wages down and workers desperate, while contrary to much of Democrat rhetoric, is ultimately the outcome their donors are paying for.
I’m not actually sure what the bolded is referring to. Capturing SCOTUS? It feels like I missed some context here.
No particular disagreement on your second paragraph. + Show Spoiler +
I’m generally skeptical that there’s an explicit buy-off happening (idk if you’d claim there is); but I certainly think systemic factors (yes, including wealthy donors) make it pretty much political suicide to try to institute major changes, even popular ones. And a major factor stabilizing that equilibrium is that workers are working too much and too worried about survival to have time and energy for political education and advocacy.
That'd be an example of an unmatched Republican win that Democrats don't even have an inkling of a strategy to match/surpass for decades, if ever (assuming Democrat ineptitude is genuine).
I mean sure, it was never really a secret that getting 6 seats on SCOTUS would be extremely effective and difficult to undo. You’ll recall this often being cited as one of the more important reasons everybody should still vote Hillary despite their reservations. But Trump won, seats captured, we’re here now.
But what’s your point? Knowing you I’d guess you want to argue in a direction like “If Democrats can’t undo overturning Roe, then why should people bother voting for them?” But if you actually cared about pro-choice, and you were now looking at two parties, one of which would like to keep abortion legal, and the other can and will ban it anywhere they get the chance (including federally), why the fuck would your response be “oh, I guess elections don’t matter any more”?
I think I’ve said before that I see voting for Democrats more as damage limitation than as The Path To Fixing Everything. That, I think, would take quite a bit more than just filling out a ballot every couple years. But damage limitation still has a pretty enormous effect on the amount of unnecessary suffering inflicted on actual humans.
I suppose there's a few.
People have convinced themselves for/by one reason or another that the US isn't the dystopian police state plasmid mentioned because it hasn't set its sights on them...yet (or it's not literally 1940's Nazi Germany). So they insist the only rational action for the groups of people they are actively coming for is to keep listening to the perpetual Democrat hold music and mindlessly voting Democrat. Oh and don't dare say Biden/Democrats piss poor performance isn't good enough, we gotta be obsequiously thankful and boisterously supportive (despite actually losing rights) or else their persistent incompetence/incapacity/unwillingness to act is blamed on us for "selfishly" demanding rights and doing so in ways that Democrats insist aren't "pragmatic" (while Democrats "paternalistically believe they can set the timetable for other peoples' freedom").
and
it does make me concerned about even the "best case scenario" where Democrats win the house, senate, and presidency and the Republican party implodes as a national party.
They aren't going to be replaced with a more moderate party, and Democrats will enthusiastically welcome an even more ghoulish opposition to run against to lower the expectations for themselves rather than lift up a party to their left and displace the Republican party. Then it's just a matter of time before you get someone with all the ghoulish intentions combined with just the right seemingly innocuous rhetoric/charisma (Trump demonstrates it's actually a pretty wide runway to hit) to mask them enough for centrists to turn a blind eye, and that's all she wrote.
As it sits it'll probably be a coinflip on whether Trump is the next president (how do you still pretend you live in a "nation of laws" after that really?) and Trump's party might just take power and never let it go.
Another point would be that by Democrat supporters own reasoning voting for Democrats isn't a viable solution but a (counterproductive imo) salve for their own conscience.
Lenin is certainly an important reference for What is to be Done but as Mohdoo pointed out earlier, Fanon and others have built on those ideas, and I believe we'll need all their work and then some. EDIT:
Christians: I tend to look at non-governmental solutions (stuff like unions and mutual aid) as promising alternative routes
Revolutionary socialists are supporters of unions and mutual aid orgs, also they have some important insight into how they've developed over the 100 or so years they've been working together.
What does "the US is a dystopian police-state" even mean? How do you define police state? Best I can tell the laws are barely being enforced where I live. You can go out on the street and deal drugs or shoot up and nobody cares. You can walk into a store and fill your arms with product and walk out and nobody will stop you. Hell, I've stopped obeying some red lights at traffic intersections if I've determined it's safe to proceed. Why should I follow the rules if nobody else is going to?
Just casually using a blowtorch in daylight hours on a busy street to break into locked product then filling up your bags and walking out of the store? Although I'll give you the "dystopian" part for sure. The fact that stores have taken it upon themselves to lock up entire aisles of shampoo and shaving cream to prevent shoplifting because our laws are so poorly enforced definitely counts as dystopian in my book. Unfortunately this is happening most in progressive cities like Portland, New York, San Francisco, etc. so I think the scenario where everything goes tits up leading to a revolution is not going to be in the direction you're hoping for.
An individual using an unusual shoplifting method doesn't have literally anything to do with the argument of a police state. In fact in a police state the police is often incentivized to ignore citizens calling for help. Case in point: Uvalde school shooting.
"The United States has militarized police, sophisticated surveillance, and also ordinary citizens with little say in what goes on. Thus, the US has all the trappings of an all-powerful police state. A Police State is a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens’ activities."
"So is the US a totalitarian state? No. It’s an inverted totalitarian state. Corporations control the government through political contributions and lobbying. The persistent political apathy allows leaders to do what they want."
"Over the last 25 years, civilian law enforcement has been increasingly militarized in America. For example, there has been a 4000% increase in no-knock, military-armed SWAT raids over the past 30 years."
"We also have the world’s most extensive prison system. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Over the last 40 years, the US prison population has risen by 700%"
Also, the opposite of a police state doesn't make for better policing, it's just the opposite extreme. Ideally police would work with and for the population, not against it. That would be the happy medium.
In my life I've probably seen several hundred cases of police brutality in the US, and that's only what's been caught on camera. Police showing up at innocent people's homes unannounced, sometimes it results in them shooting the owner to death. This kind of invasive entering of property by police is fairly normal in the US. Or non-resisting individuals getting beaten by several police officers, sometimes to death. I've seen a number of cases being caught on camera, one time it was a homeless man, another time someone fleeing a crime scene. Or individuals being pushed to the ground so that they can't breathe anymore. This happens so often that medics get calls about this quite frequently. It has resulted in death a number of times. George Floyd was not the first one, and he won't be the last one. And they do this to everyone, every community. Black, white, hispanic, any of them. And they get off with a slap on the wrist. That's one of the hallmarks of a police state. In a police state, they're not being held accountable for their actions.
A police state also doesn't mean that all police officers do a bad job, or turn a blind eye, or that they all threaten the populace. It's not required for all police officers to be bad. If just enough of them get away with being horrible officers that people have reason to be afraid of them rather than seeing eye-to-eye with them, that's enough to have an authoritarian grip on people. The fear comes from the uncertainty. The law is supposed to weed out bad cops. In the US this is not happening frequently enough. I've seen very rare instances of police actually arresting other officers for misconduct, even though it should be happening almost all the time.
Remember when you said "we should be seeing this be caught on camera all the time if it were a widespread problem"? You said this about transgender people facing discrimination and violence. Maybe you should listen to your own words. We have far too much camera footage of police misconduct in the US. You can't deny it.
I don't know what that website you're quoting from is besides being the first thing that pops up when you google "The US is a police state." Your post mostly reads as someone whose perspective of what it's like to live in the United States comes from the online content you consume. If this happened as frequently as you say then George Floyd would have been a forgotten statistic and not one of the most widely known persons in the world in 2020.
Any actual arguments or is that all?
I don’t have a good counter for “I’ve seen a lot of police brutality videos on the internet”
You're quotemining again. The incarceration rate in the US is the highest in the world, and you skipped over that fact, presumably because it's inconvenient, otherwise because you didn't actually read my whole argument.
But before we go into that, do you want to see more facts about police injustice?
"Over the past five years, shootings were the most common cause of these deaths, with gunshots accounting for more than 9 in 10 deaths. Tasers, vehicles, and physical restraint were the next three most common causes."
"Criminal prosecution for police violence remains incredibly rare. In fact, at no point over the past five years has the rate of criminal charges being filed for police killings exceeded 2 percent of cases. And 2021 is on pace to have one of the lowest rates of prosecution."
"About a dozen cases of police killings are still working their way through the system, but in 99 percent of cases in 2020, prosecutors did not file charges. So far in 2021, four cases have resulted in criminal charges against police officers."
"Charging police officers with crimes after they kill someone requires a high bar. Many observers believe that the only reason Chauvin was charged, tried, and convicted of Floyd’s murder was that a bystander recorded the incident with their phone.
Many factors shield police officers from prosecution, in most cases. Public trust in police officers, a code of silence in police agencies, and the murkiness of police-prosecutor relationships are among the issues researchers cited.
Even when an officer is on trial, prosecutors may face uphill battles to convict, said civil rights lawyer David Rudovsky."
We can safely conclude that the US police officers enjoy an outrageous amount of privilege over all other citizens. They get away with crimes at a rate comparable to that of wealthy celebrities - or perhaps even higher.
"In fact, the system has protected officers like Chauvin for decades, with very few cases of officers even losing their jobs, let alone facing federal charges or monetary reparations, for killing Black and brown people. Police officers kill around 1,000 people a year, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Data from Mapping Police Violence, a group that tracks deadly police encounters in lieu of a national database, shows that police have killed more than 6,800 civilians between 2013 and 2018. Since Chauvin's trial began on March 29, police have killed at least 64 Americans — more than half of them Black and Latinx.
And yet, since 2005, only 121 officers have been arrested on charges of murder or manslaughter after killing someone while on-duty, according to data compiled by Philip M. Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, as reported by The New York Times. And of the 121 officers arrested, only 95 of their cases concluded, and only 44 were convicted, often of the lesser charge, per the same report. Four officers were convicted of murder."
On July 13 2023 19:34 Liquid`Drone wrote: I mean, im sure theres some hyperbolic language but if you compare the US with france, germany and the UK there are something like 8, 30 and 60 times more people killed by police per capita. Cant find data for the whole of EU, but my quick glance leads me to believe it happens about 30 times as frequently. Obviously firearm culture is part of that reason, but police culture is, too.
Cellphone posting so too lazy to source things but there is plenty data showing that the US is a huge outlier compared with other wealthy western countries.
I’m on a cell phone too but I’m going to bet that the number of officers shot at with guns is also 8, 30, 60 times higher in the US than in France, Germany and the UK
Not unrealistic, but im also willing to bet that being aggressive with a knife is far more likely to get you shot in the US than in the UK.
Are you saying democrats have achieved more in the last 8 years than republicans have?
No, but come on, justify what you’re saying. I’m not even convinced “Democrats have been more unified as a party in the last 8 years” is anywhere close to true. “Democrats in disarray” has become a meme, meanwhile the defining narrative of the Trump era was “surely *this* offense is will be what makes Republicans turn against him. No? Ah, well, nevertheless…” over and over and over.
I don’t have a worked out theory of when it’s right to stand by your precise principles and when it’s right to set aside your differences to form a coalition, but all you’re offering right now is “infighting is good, actually,” with no supporting evidence whatsoever. I mean I don’t actually care about MTG and Boebert fighting, and I don’t think voters particularly do either, but “acting like angry tweens is effective politics” is a pretty hot take, dude.
Beyond the usefulness of infighting vs falling in line I think the bottom line is that there are more effective strategies than Democrats are utilizing currently, one of those strategies (and perhaps most importantly,) is the one Republicans are using.
Though I think this general perspective underplays how much things like keeping wages down and workers desperate, while contrary to much of Democrat rhetoric, is ultimately the outcome their donors are paying for.
I’m not actually sure what the bolded is referring to. Capturing SCOTUS? It feels like I missed some context here.
No particular disagreement on your second paragraph. + Show Spoiler +
I’m generally skeptical that there’s an explicit buy-off happening (idk if you’d claim there is); but I certainly think systemic factors (yes, including wealthy donors) make it pretty much political suicide to try to institute major changes, even popular ones. And a major factor stabilizing that equilibrium is that workers are working too much and too worried about survival to have time and energy for political education and advocacy.
That'd be an example of an unmatched Republican win that Democrats don't even have an inkling of a strategy to match/surpass for decades, if ever (assuming Democrat ineptitude is genuine).
I mean sure, it was never really a secret that getting 6 seats on SCOTUS would be extremely effective and difficult to undo. You’ll recall this often being cited as one of the more important reasons everybody should still vote Hillary despite their reservations. But Trump won, seats captured, we’re here now.
But what’s your point? Knowing you I’d guess you want to argue in a direction like “If Democrats can’t undo overturning Roe, then why should people bother voting for them?” But if you actually cared about pro-choice, and you were now looking at two parties, one of which would like to keep abortion legal, and the other can and will ban it anywhere they get the chance (including federally), why the fuck would your response be “oh, I guess elections don’t matter any more”?
I think I’ve said before that I see voting for Democrats more as damage limitation than as The Path To Fixing Everything. That, I think, would take quite a bit more than just filling out a ballot every couple years. But damage limitation still has a pretty enormous effect on the amount of unnecessary suffering inflicted on actual humans.
I suppose there's a few.
People have convinced themselves for/by one reason or another that the US isn't the dystopian police state plasmid mentioned because it hasn't set its sights on them...yet (or it's not literally 1940's Nazi Germany). So they insist the only rational action for the groups of people they are actively coming for is to keep listening to the perpetual Democrat hold music and mindlessly voting Democrat. Oh and don't dare say Biden/Democrats piss poor performance isn't good enough, we gotta be obsequiously thankful and boisterously supportive (despite actually losing rights) or else their persistent incompetence/incapacity/unwillingness to act is blamed on us for "selfishly" demanding rights and doing so in ways that Democrats insist aren't "pragmatic" (while Democrats "paternalistically believe they can set the timetable for other peoples' freedom").
and
it does make me concerned about even the "best case scenario" where Democrats win the house, senate, and presidency and the Republican party implodes as a national party.
They aren't going to be replaced with a more moderate party, and Democrats will enthusiastically welcome an even more ghoulish opposition to run against to lower the expectations for themselves rather than lift up a party to their left and displace the Republican party. Then it's just a matter of time before you get someone with all the ghoulish intentions combined with just the right seemingly innocuous rhetoric/charisma (Trump demonstrates it's actually a pretty wide runway to hit) to mask them enough for centrists to turn a blind eye, and that's all she wrote.
As it sits it'll probably be a coinflip on whether Trump is the next president (how do you still pretend you live in a "nation of laws" after that really?) and Trump's party might just take power and never let it go.
Another point would be that by Democrat supporters own reasoning voting for Democrats isn't a viable solution but a (counterproductive imo) salve for their own conscience.
Lenin is certainly an important reference for What is to be Done but as Mohdoo pointed out earlier, Fanon and others have built on those ideas, and I believe we'll need all their work and then some. EDIT:
Christians: I tend to look at non-governmental solutions (stuff like unions and mutual aid) as promising alternative routes
Revolutionary socialists are supporters of unions and mutual aid orgs, also they have some important insight into how they've developed over the 100 or so years they've been working together.
What does "the US is a dystopian police-state" even mean? How do you define police state? Best I can tell the laws are barely being enforced where I live. You can go out on the street and deal drugs or shoot up and nobody cares. You can walk into a store and fill your arms with product and walk out and nobody will stop you. Hell, I've stopped obeying some red lights at traffic intersections if I've determined it's safe to proceed. Why should I follow the rules if nobody else is going to?
Just casually using a blowtorch in daylight hours on a busy street to break into locked product then filling up your bags and walking out of the store? Although I'll give you the "dystopian" part for sure. The fact that stores have taken it upon themselves to lock up entire aisles of shampoo and shaving cream to prevent shoplifting because our laws are so poorly enforced definitely counts as dystopian in my book. Unfortunately this is happening most in progressive cities like Portland, New York, San Francisco, etc. so I think the scenario where everything goes tits up leading to a revolution is not going to be in the direction you're hoping for.
An individual using an unusual shoplifting method doesn't have literally anything to do with the argument of a police state. In fact in a police state the police is often incentivized to ignore citizens calling for help. Case in point: Uvalde school shooting.
"The United States has militarized police, sophisticated surveillance, and also ordinary citizens with little say in what goes on. Thus, the US has all the trappings of an all-powerful police state. A Police State is a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens’ activities."
"So is the US a totalitarian state? No. It’s an inverted totalitarian state. Corporations control the government through political contributions and lobbying. The persistent political apathy allows leaders to do what they want."
"Over the last 25 years, civilian law enforcement has been increasingly militarized in America. For example, there has been a 4000% increase in no-knock, military-armed SWAT raids over the past 30 years."
"We also have the world’s most extensive prison system. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Over the last 40 years, the US prison population has risen by 700%"
Also, the opposite of a police state doesn't make for better policing, it's just the opposite extreme. Ideally police would work with and for the population, not against it. That would be the happy medium.
In my life I've probably seen several hundred cases of police brutality in the US, and that's only what's been caught on camera. Police showing up at innocent people's homes unannounced, sometimes it results in them shooting the owner to death. This kind of invasive entering of property by police is fairly normal in the US. Or non-resisting individuals getting beaten by several police officers, sometimes to death. I've seen a number of cases being caught on camera, one time it was a homeless man, another time someone fleeing a crime scene. Or individuals being pushed to the ground so that they can't breathe anymore. This happens so often that medics get calls about this quite frequently. It has resulted in death a number of times. George Floyd was not the first one, and he won't be the last one. And they do this to everyone, every community. Black, white, hispanic, any of them. And they get off with a slap on the wrist. That's one of the hallmarks of a police state. In a police state, they're not being held accountable for their actions.
A police state also doesn't mean that all police officers do a bad job, or turn a blind eye, or that they all threaten the populace. It's not required for all police officers to be bad. If just enough of them get away with being horrible officers that people have reason to be afraid of them rather than seeing eye-to-eye with them, that's enough to have an authoritarian grip on people. The fear comes from the uncertainty. The law is supposed to weed out bad cops. In the US this is not happening frequently enough. I've seen very rare instances of police actually arresting other officers for misconduct, even though it should be happening almost all the time.
Remember when you said "we should be seeing this be caught on camera all the time if it were a widespread problem"? You said this about transgender people facing discrimination and violence. Maybe you should listen to your own words. We have far too much camera footage of police misconduct in the US. You can't deny it.
I don't know what that website you're quoting from is besides being the first thing that pops up when you google "The US is a police state." Your post mostly reads as someone whose perspective of what it's like to live in the United States comes from the online content you consume. If this happened as frequently as you say then George Floyd would have been a forgotten statistic and not one of the most widely known persons in the world in 2020.
George Floyd only sprung to prominence as an avatar of consistent policy enactment
If he was a complete outlier you wouldn’t have got the multitude of protest movements one saw
Movements tend to only spring from something recognisably true, interpretations will vary of course. Some may disagree with say, socialism as the solution, but socialism needs concrete examples of poverty to make its case. If they didn’t exist you’d have no way of gaining traction
On July 12 2023 14:36 ChristianS wrote: [quote] I’m not actually sure what the bolded is referring to. Capturing SCOTUS? It feels like I missed some context here.
No particular disagreement on your second paragraph. + Show Spoiler +
I’m generally skeptical that there’s an explicit buy-off happening (idk if you’d claim there is); but I certainly think systemic factors (yes, including wealthy donors) make it pretty much political suicide to try to institute major changes, even popular ones. And a major factor stabilizing that equilibrium is that workers are working too much and too worried about survival to have time and energy for political education and advocacy.
That'd be an example of an unmatched Republican win that Democrats don't even have an inkling of a strategy to match/surpass for decades, if ever (assuming Democrat ineptitude is genuine).
I mean sure, it was never really a secret that getting 6 seats on SCOTUS would be extremely effective and difficult to undo. You’ll recall this often being cited as one of the more important reasons everybody should still vote Hillary despite their reservations. But Trump won, seats captured, we’re here now.
But what’s your point? Knowing you I’d guess you want to argue in a direction like “If Democrats can’t undo overturning Roe, then why should people bother voting for them?” But if you actually cared about pro-choice, and you were now looking at two parties, one of which would like to keep abortion legal, and the other can and will ban it anywhere they get the chance (including federally), why the fuck would your response be “oh, I guess elections don’t matter any more”?
I think I’ve said before that I see voting for Democrats more as damage limitation than as The Path To Fixing Everything. That, I think, would take quite a bit more than just filling out a ballot every couple years. But damage limitation still has a pretty enormous effect on the amount of unnecessary suffering inflicted on actual humans.
I suppose there's a few.
People have convinced themselves for/by one reason or another that the US isn't the dystopian police state plasmid mentioned because it hasn't set its sights on them...yet (or it's not literally 1940's Nazi Germany). So they insist the only rational action for the groups of people they are actively coming for is to keep listening to the perpetual Democrat hold music and mindlessly voting Democrat. Oh and don't dare say Biden/Democrats piss poor performance isn't good enough, we gotta be obsequiously thankful and boisterously supportive (despite actually losing rights) or else their persistent incompetence/incapacity/unwillingness to act is blamed on us for "selfishly" demanding rights and doing so in ways that Democrats insist aren't "pragmatic" (while Democrats "paternalistically believe they can set the timetable for other peoples' freedom").
and
it does make me concerned about even the "best case scenario" where Democrats win the house, senate, and presidency and the Republican party implodes as a national party.
They aren't going to be replaced with a more moderate party, and Democrats will enthusiastically welcome an even more ghoulish opposition to run against to lower the expectations for themselves rather than lift up a party to their left and displace the Republican party. Then it's just a matter of time before you get someone with all the ghoulish intentions combined with just the right seemingly innocuous rhetoric/charisma (Trump demonstrates it's actually a pretty wide runway to hit) to mask them enough for centrists to turn a blind eye, and that's all she wrote.
As it sits it'll probably be a coinflip on whether Trump is the next president (how do you still pretend you live in a "nation of laws" after that really?) and Trump's party might just take power and never let it go.
Another point would be that by Democrat supporters own reasoning voting for Democrats isn't a viable solution but a (counterproductive imo) salve for their own conscience.
Lenin is certainly an important reference for What is to be Done but as Mohdoo pointed out earlier, Fanon and others have built on those ideas, and I believe we'll need all their work and then some. EDIT:
Christians: I tend to look at non-governmental solutions (stuff like unions and mutual aid) as promising alternative routes
Revolutionary socialists are supporters of unions and mutual aid orgs, also they have some important insight into how they've developed over the 100 or so years they've been working together.
What does "the US is a dystopian police-state" even mean? How do you define police state? Best I can tell the laws are barely being enforced where I live. You can go out on the street and deal drugs or shoot up and nobody cares. You can walk into a store and fill your arms with product and walk out and nobody will stop you. Hell, I've stopped obeying some red lights at traffic intersections if I've determined it's safe to proceed. Why should I follow the rules if nobody else is going to?
Just casually using a blowtorch in daylight hours on a busy street to break into locked product then filling up your bags and walking out of the store? Although I'll give you the "dystopian" part for sure. The fact that stores have taken it upon themselves to lock up entire aisles of shampoo and shaving cream to prevent shoplifting because our laws are so poorly enforced definitely counts as dystopian in my book. Unfortunately this is happening most in progressive cities like Portland, New York, San Francisco, etc. so I think the scenario where everything goes tits up leading to a revolution is not going to be in the direction you're hoping for.
An individual using an unusual shoplifting method doesn't have literally anything to do with the argument of a police state. In fact in a police state the police is often incentivized to ignore citizens calling for help. Case in point: Uvalde school shooting.
"The United States has militarized police, sophisticated surveillance, and also ordinary citizens with little say in what goes on. Thus, the US has all the trappings of an all-powerful police state. A Police State is a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens’ activities."
"So is the US a totalitarian state? No. It’s an inverted totalitarian state. Corporations control the government through political contributions and lobbying. The persistent political apathy allows leaders to do what they want."
"Over the last 25 years, civilian law enforcement has been increasingly militarized in America. For example, there has been a 4000% increase in no-knock, military-armed SWAT raids over the past 30 years."
"We also have the world’s most extensive prison system. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Over the last 40 years, the US prison population has risen by 700%"
Also, the opposite of a police state doesn't make for better policing, it's just the opposite extreme. Ideally police would work with and for the population, not against it. That would be the happy medium.
In my life I've probably seen several hundred cases of police brutality in the US, and that's only what's been caught on camera. Police showing up at innocent people's homes unannounced, sometimes it results in them shooting the owner to death. This kind of invasive entering of property by police is fairly normal in the US. Or non-resisting individuals getting beaten by several police officers, sometimes to death. I've seen a number of cases being caught on camera, one time it was a homeless man, another time someone fleeing a crime scene. Or individuals being pushed to the ground so that they can't breathe anymore. This happens so often that medics get calls about this quite frequently. It has resulted in death a number of times. George Floyd was not the first one, and he won't be the last one. And they do this to everyone, every community. Black, white, hispanic, any of them. And they get off with a slap on the wrist. That's one of the hallmarks of a police state. In a police state, they're not being held accountable for their actions.
A police state also doesn't mean that all police officers do a bad job, or turn a blind eye, or that they all threaten the populace. It's not required for all police officers to be bad. If just enough of them get away with being horrible officers that people have reason to be afraid of them rather than seeing eye-to-eye with them, that's enough to have an authoritarian grip on people. The fear comes from the uncertainty. The law is supposed to weed out bad cops. In the US this is not happening frequently enough. I've seen very rare instances of police actually arresting other officers for misconduct, even though it should be happening almost all the time.
Remember when you said "we should be seeing this be caught on camera all the time if it were a widespread problem"? You said this about transgender people facing discrimination and violence. Maybe you should listen to your own words. We have far too much camera footage of police misconduct in the US. You can't deny it.
I don't know what that website you're quoting from is besides being the first thing that pops up when you google "The US is a police state." Your post mostly reads as someone whose perspective of what it's like to live in the United States comes from the online content you consume. If this happened as frequently as you say then George Floyd would have been a forgotten statistic and not one of the most widely known persons in the world in 2020.
Any actual arguments or is that all?
I don’t have a good counter for “I’ve seen a lot of police brutality videos on the internet”
You're quotemining again. The incarceration rate in the US is the highest in the world, and you skipped over that fact, presumably because it's inconvenient, otherwise because you didn't actually read my whole argument.
But before we go into that, do you want to see more facts about police injustice?
"Over the past five years, shootings were the most common cause of these deaths, with gunshots accounting for more than 9 in 10 deaths. Tasers, vehicles, and physical restraint were the next three most common causes."
"Criminal prosecution for police violence remains incredibly rare. In fact, at no point over the past five years has the rate of criminal charges being filed for police killings exceeded 2 percent of cases. And 2021 is on pace to have one of the lowest rates of prosecution."
"About a dozen cases of police killings are still working their way through the system, but in 99 percent of cases in 2020, prosecutors did not file charges. So far in 2021, four cases have resulted in criminal charges against police officers."
"Charging police officers with crimes after they kill someone requires a high bar. Many observers believe that the only reason Chauvin was charged, tried, and convicted of Floyd’s murder was that a bystander recorded the incident with their phone.
Many factors shield police officers from prosecution, in most cases. Public trust in police officers, a code of silence in police agencies, and the murkiness of police-prosecutor relationships are among the issues researchers cited.
Even when an officer is on trial, prosecutors may face uphill battles to convict, said civil rights lawyer David Rudovsky."
We can safely conclude that the US police officers enjoy an outrageous amount of privilege over all other citizens. They get away with crimes at a rate comparable to that of wealthy celebrities - or perhaps even higher.
"In fact, the system has protected officers like Chauvin for decades, with very few cases of officers even losing their jobs, let alone facing federal charges or monetary reparations, for killing Black and brown people. Police officers kill around 1,000 people a year, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Data from Mapping Police Violence, a group that tracks deadly police encounters in lieu of a national database, shows that police have killed more than 6,800 civilians between 2013 and 2018. Since Chauvin's trial began on March 29, police have killed at least 64 Americans — more than half of them Black and Latinx.
And yet, since 2005, only 121 officers have been arrested on charges of murder or manslaughter after killing someone while on-duty, according to data compiled by Philip M. Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, as reported by The New York Times. And of the 121 officers arrested, only 95 of their cases concluded, and only 44 were convicted, often of the lesser charge, per the same report. Four officers were convicted of murder."
What percent of cops should be charged for shooting someone? 50%? 100%? You must have some idea since your post is that essentially the X% of cops that are charged is way too low.
Charging? The guilty ones. Seriously and methodically investigating? Every time an officer fires his gun.
Some stats I could quickly gather:
In 2022 it was 60 officers killed in the US. I found an article about germany. It seems to list every event that resultet in the violent death of police officers in the last 20 years. It's 21 events but in some more than one officer died. Since 1940 a grand total of 402 officers died by force (according to the german police union). In most of europe these numbers seem to be too low to get any meaningfull statistics, I can just find articles over specific events. I would guess that 60 dead police officers in the US per capita is higher than the average in Europe, but magnitudes less so than the numbers of police (unecessarily) killing civilians/criminals. Maybe france comes somewhat close to the US per capita, but france notoriously has the most deadly police in the EU.
Also, police officer in the US is not one of the most dangerous jobs. They are at rank 22 with 14 deaths per 100'000 a year. https://www.facilities.udel.edu/safety/4689/ albeit these deaths are in fact largely due to actual violence and not accidents.
Make out of all that what you will, imho american gun culture (well, fetish) is the main reason... FFS the US is more akin to some (near) failed middle/south american states than other rich nations when it comes to gun violence (no matter if you include/exclude suicide and "gun"-accidents). There is no metric one can find that doesn't clearly points out that US gun "culture" is anything but a giant problem for the country.
On July 12 2023 15:58 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
That'd be an example of an unmatched Republican win that Democrats don't even have an inkling of a strategy to match/surpass for decades, if ever (assuming Democrat ineptitude is genuine).
I mean sure, it was never really a secret that getting 6 seats on SCOTUS would be extremely effective and difficult to undo. You’ll recall this often being cited as one of the more important reasons everybody should still vote Hillary despite their reservations. But Trump won, seats captured, we’re here now.
But what’s your point? Knowing you I’d guess you want to argue in a direction like “If Democrats can’t undo overturning Roe, then why should people bother voting for them?” But if you actually cared about pro-choice, and you were now looking at two parties, one of which would like to keep abortion legal, and the other can and will ban it anywhere they get the chance (including federally), why the fuck would your response be “oh, I guess elections don’t matter any more”?
I think I’ve said before that I see voting for Democrats more as damage limitation than as The Path To Fixing Everything. That, I think, would take quite a bit more than just filling out a ballot every couple years. But damage limitation still has a pretty enormous effect on the amount of unnecessary suffering inflicted on actual humans.
I suppose there's a few.
People have convinced themselves for/by one reason or another that the US isn't the dystopian police state plasmid mentioned because it hasn't set its sights on them...yet (or it's not literally 1940's Nazi Germany). So they insist the only rational action for the groups of people they are actively coming for is to keep listening to the perpetual Democrat hold music and mindlessly voting Democrat. Oh and don't dare say Biden/Democrats piss poor performance isn't good enough, we gotta be obsequiously thankful and boisterously supportive (despite actually losing rights) or else their persistent incompetence/incapacity/unwillingness to act is blamed on us for "selfishly" demanding rights and doing so in ways that Democrats insist aren't "pragmatic" (while Democrats "paternalistically believe they can set the timetable for other peoples' freedom").
and
it does make me concerned about even the "best case scenario" where Democrats win the house, senate, and presidency and the Republican party implodes as a national party.
They aren't going to be replaced with a more moderate party, and Democrats will enthusiastically welcome an even more ghoulish opposition to run against to lower the expectations for themselves rather than lift up a party to their left and displace the Republican party. Then it's just a matter of time before you get someone with all the ghoulish intentions combined with just the right seemingly innocuous rhetoric/charisma (Trump demonstrates it's actually a pretty wide runway to hit) to mask them enough for centrists to turn a blind eye, and that's all she wrote.
As it sits it'll probably be a coinflip on whether Trump is the next president (how do you still pretend you live in a "nation of laws" after that really?) and Trump's party might just take power and never let it go.
Another point would be that by Democrat supporters own reasoning voting for Democrats isn't a viable solution but a (counterproductive imo) salve for their own conscience.
Lenin is certainly an important reference for What is to be Done but as Mohdoo pointed out earlier, Fanon and others have built on those ideas, and I believe we'll need all their work and then some. EDIT:
Christians: I tend to look at non-governmental solutions (stuff like unions and mutual aid) as promising alternative routes
Revolutionary socialists are supporters of unions and mutual aid orgs, also they have some important insight into how they've developed over the 100 or so years they've been working together.
What does "the US is a dystopian police-state" even mean? How do you define police state? Best I can tell the laws are barely being enforced where I live. You can go out on the street and deal drugs or shoot up and nobody cares. You can walk into a store and fill your arms with product and walk out and nobody will stop you. Hell, I've stopped obeying some red lights at traffic intersections if I've determined it's safe to proceed. Why should I follow the rules if nobody else is going to?
Just casually using a blowtorch in daylight hours on a busy street to break into locked product then filling up your bags and walking out of the store? Although I'll give you the "dystopian" part for sure. The fact that stores have taken it upon themselves to lock up entire aisles of shampoo and shaving cream to prevent shoplifting because our laws are so poorly enforced definitely counts as dystopian in my book. Unfortunately this is happening most in progressive cities like Portland, New York, San Francisco, etc. so I think the scenario where everything goes tits up leading to a revolution is not going to be in the direction you're hoping for.
An individual using an unusual shoplifting method doesn't have literally anything to do with the argument of a police state. In fact in a police state the police is often incentivized to ignore citizens calling for help. Case in point: Uvalde school shooting.
"The United States has militarized police, sophisticated surveillance, and also ordinary citizens with little say in what goes on. Thus, the US has all the trappings of an all-powerful police state. A Police State is a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens’ activities."
"So is the US a totalitarian state? No. It’s an inverted totalitarian state. Corporations control the government through political contributions and lobbying. The persistent political apathy allows leaders to do what they want."
"Over the last 25 years, civilian law enforcement has been increasingly militarized in America. For example, there has been a 4000% increase in no-knock, military-armed SWAT raids over the past 30 years."
"We also have the world’s most extensive prison system. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Over the last 40 years, the US prison population has risen by 700%"
Also, the opposite of a police state doesn't make for better policing, it's just the opposite extreme. Ideally police would work with and for the population, not against it. That would be the happy medium.
In my life I've probably seen several hundred cases of police brutality in the US, and that's only what's been caught on camera. Police showing up at innocent people's homes unannounced, sometimes it results in them shooting the owner to death. This kind of invasive entering of property by police is fairly normal in the US. Or non-resisting individuals getting beaten by several police officers, sometimes to death. I've seen a number of cases being caught on camera, one time it was a homeless man, another time someone fleeing a crime scene. Or individuals being pushed to the ground so that they can't breathe anymore. This happens so often that medics get calls about this quite frequently. It has resulted in death a number of times. George Floyd was not the first one, and he won't be the last one. And they do this to everyone, every community. Black, white, hispanic, any of them. And they get off with a slap on the wrist. That's one of the hallmarks of a police state. In a police state, they're not being held accountable for their actions.
A police state also doesn't mean that all police officers do a bad job, or turn a blind eye, or that they all threaten the populace. It's not required for all police officers to be bad. If just enough of them get away with being horrible officers that people have reason to be afraid of them rather than seeing eye-to-eye with them, that's enough to have an authoritarian grip on people. The fear comes from the uncertainty. The law is supposed to weed out bad cops. In the US this is not happening frequently enough. I've seen very rare instances of police actually arresting other officers for misconduct, even though it should be happening almost all the time.
Remember when you said "we should be seeing this be caught on camera all the time if it were a widespread problem"? You said this about transgender people facing discrimination and violence. Maybe you should listen to your own words. We have far too much camera footage of police misconduct in the US. You can't deny it.
I don't know what that website you're quoting from is besides being the first thing that pops up when you google "The US is a police state." Your post mostly reads as someone whose perspective of what it's like to live in the United States comes from the online content you consume. If this happened as frequently as you say then George Floyd would have been a forgotten statistic and not one of the most widely known persons in the world in 2020.
Any actual arguments or is that all?
I don’t have a good counter for “I’ve seen a lot of police brutality videos on the internet”
You're quotemining again. The incarceration rate in the US is the highest in the world, and you skipped over that fact, presumably because it's inconvenient, otherwise because you didn't actually read my whole argument.
But before we go into that, do you want to see more facts about police injustice?
"Over the past five years, shootings were the most common cause of these deaths, with gunshots accounting for more than 9 in 10 deaths. Tasers, vehicles, and physical restraint were the next three most common causes."
"Criminal prosecution for police violence remains incredibly rare. In fact, at no point over the past five years has the rate of criminal charges being filed for police killings exceeded 2 percent of cases. And 2021 is on pace to have one of the lowest rates of prosecution."
"About a dozen cases of police killings are still working their way through the system, but in 99 percent of cases in 2020, prosecutors did not file charges. So far in 2021, four cases have resulted in criminal charges against police officers."
"Charging police officers with crimes after they kill someone requires a high bar. Many observers believe that the only reason Chauvin was charged, tried, and convicted of Floyd’s murder was that a bystander recorded the incident with their phone.
Many factors shield police officers from prosecution, in most cases. Public trust in police officers, a code of silence in police agencies, and the murkiness of police-prosecutor relationships are among the issues researchers cited.
Even when an officer is on trial, prosecutors may face uphill battles to convict, said civil rights lawyer David Rudovsky."
We can safely conclude that the US police officers enjoy an outrageous amount of privilege over all other citizens. They get away with crimes at a rate comparable to that of wealthy celebrities - or perhaps even higher.
"In fact, the system has protected officers like Chauvin for decades, with very few cases of officers even losing their jobs, let alone facing federal charges or monetary reparations, for killing Black and brown people. Police officers kill around 1,000 people a year, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Data from Mapping Police Violence, a group that tracks deadly police encounters in lieu of a national database, shows that police have killed more than 6,800 civilians between 2013 and 2018. Since Chauvin's trial began on March 29, police have killed at least 64 Americans — more than half of them Black and Latinx.
And yet, since 2005, only 121 officers have been arrested on charges of murder or manslaughter after killing someone while on-duty, according to data compiled by Philip M. Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, as reported by The New York Times. And of the 121 officers arrested, only 95 of their cases concluded, and only 44 were convicted, often of the lesser charge, per the same report. Four officers were convicted of murder."
What percent of cops should be charged for shooting someone? 50%? 100%? You must have some idea since your post is that essentially the X% of cops that are charged is way too low.
On a legitimate case by case basis, setting an arbitrary threshold is silly.
How many people should be in prison? As many as commit imprisonable offences. In a crude sense and notwithstanding many other factors
Chauvin was just unfortunate his particular case escalated to a global media firestorm whereupon he was always going to get convicted. It doesn’t speak to a particularly well-regulated and officiated system
BJ, ill just ask early on this time. Do you think American police officers have a similar line for when to use deadly force as what you see in most EU countries, or do you think they are more or less willing? I myself think they have a far lower threshold than police officers in the UK,lower than almost all EU countries, however, possibly comparable to what you see in France. That said, in france we recently saw riots as a result of a police killing anyway.
On July 12 2023 22:23 ChristianS wrote: [quote] I mean sure, it was never really a secret that getting 6 seats on SCOTUS would be extremely effective and difficult to undo. You’ll recall this often being cited as one of the more important reasons everybody should still vote Hillary despite their reservations. But Trump won, seats captured, we’re here now.
But what’s your point? Knowing you I’d guess you want to argue in a direction like “If Democrats can’t undo overturning Roe, then why should people bother voting for them?” But if you actually cared about pro-choice, and you were now looking at two parties, one of which would like to keep abortion legal, and the other can and will ban it anywhere they get the chance (including federally), why the fuck would your response be “oh, I guess elections don’t matter any more”?
I think I’ve said before that I see voting for Democrats more as damage limitation than as The Path To Fixing Everything. That, I think, would take quite a bit more than just filling out a ballot every couple years. But damage limitation still has a pretty enormous effect on the amount of unnecessary suffering inflicted on actual humans.
I suppose there's a few.
People have convinced themselves for/by one reason or another that the US isn't the dystopian police state plasmid mentioned because it hasn't set its sights on them...yet (or it's not literally 1940's Nazi Germany). So they insist the only rational action for the groups of people they are actively coming for is to keep listening to the perpetual Democrat hold music and mindlessly voting Democrat. Oh and don't dare say Biden/Democrats piss poor performance isn't good enough, we gotta be obsequiously thankful and boisterously supportive (despite actually losing rights) or else their persistent incompetence/incapacity/unwillingness to act is blamed on us for "selfishly" demanding rights and doing so in ways that Democrats insist aren't "pragmatic" (while Democrats "paternalistically believe they can set the timetable for other peoples' freedom").
and
it does make me concerned about even the "best case scenario" where Democrats win the house, senate, and presidency and the Republican party implodes as a national party.
They aren't going to be replaced with a more moderate party, and Democrats will enthusiastically welcome an even more ghoulish opposition to run against to lower the expectations for themselves rather than lift up a party to their left and displace the Republican party. Then it's just a matter of time before you get someone with all the ghoulish intentions combined with just the right seemingly innocuous rhetoric/charisma (Trump demonstrates it's actually a pretty wide runway to hit) to mask them enough for centrists to turn a blind eye, and that's all she wrote.
As it sits it'll probably be a coinflip on whether Trump is the next president (how do you still pretend you live in a "nation of laws" after that really?) and Trump's party might just take power and never let it go.
Another point would be that by Democrat supporters own reasoning voting for Democrats isn't a viable solution but a (counterproductive imo) salve for their own conscience.
Lenin is certainly an important reference for What is to be Done but as Mohdoo pointed out earlier, Fanon and others have built on those ideas, and I believe we'll need all their work and then some. EDIT:
Christians: I tend to look at non-governmental solutions (stuff like unions and mutual aid) as promising alternative routes
Revolutionary socialists are supporters of unions and mutual aid orgs, also they have some important insight into how they've developed over the 100 or so years they've been working together.
What does "the US is a dystopian police-state" even mean? How do you define police state? Best I can tell the laws are barely being enforced where I live. You can go out on the street and deal drugs or shoot up and nobody cares. You can walk into a store and fill your arms with product and walk out and nobody will stop you. Hell, I've stopped obeying some red lights at traffic intersections if I've determined it's safe to proceed. Why should I follow the rules if nobody else is going to?
Just casually using a blowtorch in daylight hours on a busy street to break into locked product then filling up your bags and walking out of the store? Although I'll give you the "dystopian" part for sure. The fact that stores have taken it upon themselves to lock up entire aisles of shampoo and shaving cream to prevent shoplifting because our laws are so poorly enforced definitely counts as dystopian in my book. Unfortunately this is happening most in progressive cities like Portland, New York, San Francisco, etc. so I think the scenario where everything goes tits up leading to a revolution is not going to be in the direction you're hoping for.
An individual using an unusual shoplifting method doesn't have literally anything to do with the argument of a police state. In fact in a police state the police is often incentivized to ignore citizens calling for help. Case in point: Uvalde school shooting.
"The United States has militarized police, sophisticated surveillance, and also ordinary citizens with little say in what goes on. Thus, the US has all the trappings of an all-powerful police state. A Police State is a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens’ activities."
"So is the US a totalitarian state? No. It’s an inverted totalitarian state. Corporations control the government through political contributions and lobbying. The persistent political apathy allows leaders to do what they want."
"Over the last 25 years, civilian law enforcement has been increasingly militarized in America. For example, there has been a 4000% increase in no-knock, military-armed SWAT raids over the past 30 years."
"We also have the world’s most extensive prison system. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Over the last 40 years, the US prison population has risen by 700%"
Also, the opposite of a police state doesn't make for better policing, it's just the opposite extreme. Ideally police would work with and for the population, not against it. That would be the happy medium.
In my life I've probably seen several hundred cases of police brutality in the US, and that's only what's been caught on camera. Police showing up at innocent people's homes unannounced, sometimes it results in them shooting the owner to death. This kind of invasive entering of property by police is fairly normal in the US. Or non-resisting individuals getting beaten by several police officers, sometimes to death. I've seen a number of cases being caught on camera, one time it was a homeless man, another time someone fleeing a crime scene. Or individuals being pushed to the ground so that they can't breathe anymore. This happens so often that medics get calls about this quite frequently. It has resulted in death a number of times. George Floyd was not the first one, and he won't be the last one. And they do this to everyone, every community. Black, white, hispanic, any of them. And they get off with a slap on the wrist. That's one of the hallmarks of a police state. In a police state, they're not being held accountable for their actions.
A police state also doesn't mean that all police officers do a bad job, or turn a blind eye, or that they all threaten the populace. It's not required for all police officers to be bad. If just enough of them get away with being horrible officers that people have reason to be afraid of them rather than seeing eye-to-eye with them, that's enough to have an authoritarian grip on people. The fear comes from the uncertainty. The law is supposed to weed out bad cops. In the US this is not happening frequently enough. I've seen very rare instances of police actually arresting other officers for misconduct, even though it should be happening almost all the time.
Remember when you said "we should be seeing this be caught on camera all the time if it were a widespread problem"? You said this about transgender people facing discrimination and violence. Maybe you should listen to your own words. We have far too much camera footage of police misconduct in the US. You can't deny it.
I don't know what that website you're quoting from is besides being the first thing that pops up when you google "The US is a police state." Your post mostly reads as someone whose perspective of what it's like to live in the United States comes from the online content you consume. If this happened as frequently as you say then George Floyd would have been a forgotten statistic and not one of the most widely known persons in the world in 2020.
Any actual arguments or is that all?
I don’t have a good counter for “I’ve seen a lot of police brutality videos on the internet”
You're quotemining again. The incarceration rate in the US is the highest in the world, and you skipped over that fact, presumably because it's inconvenient, otherwise because you didn't actually read my whole argument.
But before we go into that, do you want to see more facts about police injustice?
"Over the past five years, shootings were the most common cause of these deaths, with gunshots accounting for more than 9 in 10 deaths. Tasers, vehicles, and physical restraint were the next three most common causes."
"Criminal prosecution for police violence remains incredibly rare. In fact, at no point over the past five years has the rate of criminal charges being filed for police killings exceeded 2 percent of cases. And 2021 is on pace to have one of the lowest rates of prosecution."
"About a dozen cases of police killings are still working their way through the system, but in 99 percent of cases in 2020, prosecutors did not file charges. So far in 2021, four cases have resulted in criminal charges against police officers."
"Charging police officers with crimes after they kill someone requires a high bar. Many observers believe that the only reason Chauvin was charged, tried, and convicted of Floyd’s murder was that a bystander recorded the incident with their phone.
Many factors shield police officers from prosecution, in most cases. Public trust in police officers, a code of silence in police agencies, and the murkiness of police-prosecutor relationships are among the issues researchers cited.
Even when an officer is on trial, prosecutors may face uphill battles to convict, said civil rights lawyer David Rudovsky."
We can safely conclude that the US police officers enjoy an outrageous amount of privilege over all other citizens. They get away with crimes at a rate comparable to that of wealthy celebrities - or perhaps even higher.
"In fact, the system has protected officers like Chauvin for decades, with very few cases of officers even losing their jobs, let alone facing federal charges or monetary reparations, for killing Black and brown people. Police officers kill around 1,000 people a year, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Data from Mapping Police Violence, a group that tracks deadly police encounters in lieu of a national database, shows that police have killed more than 6,800 civilians between 2013 and 2018. Since Chauvin's trial began on March 29, police have killed at least 64 Americans — more than half of them Black and Latinx.
And yet, since 2005, only 121 officers have been arrested on charges of murder or manslaughter after killing someone while on-duty, according to data compiled by Philip M. Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, as reported by The New York Times. And of the 121 officers arrested, only 95 of their cases concluded, and only 44 were convicted, often of the lesser charge, per the same report. Four officers were convicted of murder."
What percent of cops should be charged for shooting someone? 50%? 100%? You must have some idea since your post is that essentially the X% of cops that are charged is way too low.
On a legitimate case by case basis, setting an arbitrary threshold is silly.
How many people should be in prison? As many as commit imprisonable offences. In a crude sense and notwithstanding many other factors
Chauvin was just unfortunate his particular case escalated to a global media firestorm whereupon he was always going to get convicted. It doesn’t speak to a particularly well-regulated and officiated system
Yes I agree. It’s silly to say X% is too low just because it seems low. As Velr said 60+ police officers are shot and killed every year. A source I read said another 250 were shot and not killed. How many more are shot at but not hit? I’d say as a rule of thumb police shootings are justified if they are being shot at and that probably covers quite a few just by itself.
On July 13 2023 20:44 Liquid`Drone wrote: BJ, ill just ask early on this time. Do you think American police officers have a similar line for when to use deadly force as what you see in most EU countries, or do you think they are more or less willing? I myself think they have a far lower threshold than police officers in the UK,lower than almost all EU countries, however, possibly comparable to what you see in France. That said, in france we recently saw riots as a result of a police killing anyway.
I think being more likely to get shot in the US for being aggressive with a knife than in other western democracies is probably an accurate reflection of reality. I don’t think thats even a fraction of the way to making the US a “police state.” In the UK you’re far more likely to have the police show up for something objectionable you’ve posted online. As someone that posts unpopular opinions online way more than I charge police officers with knives I would feel far more threatened by the latter use of police force.
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but as Mohdoo pointed out earlier, Fanon and others have built on those ideas, and I believe we'll need all their work and then some. 
