[randomchars]

> I'm sorry that you're offended.

No no, I'm sorry, it was not the best choise of words. It's more that I'm perplexed by your naivety.

You freely admin that the police is the enemy of the people, the very police that's supposed to protect people. Now what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?

[phobosanomaly]

Because organizations like the CIA have almost complete impunity to do whatever they want outside of the borders of the United States.

Why worry about some guy who lives in a shitty apartment in the San Fernando Valley and works at 7/11 when you can use all the toys in the arsenal to disappear clerics in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan without anyone saying as much as a word.

They get to play with Predator Drones. JSOC drops kill/capture teams out of HH-60 Pave Hawks with satellite and drone overwatch in Afghanistan. They can run snatch-and-grabs on the streets of Italy. Nobody even knows all of the off-the-books operations they're running in the horn of Africa.

The domestic United States is pretty boring by comparison. What, are they going to hassle the 7/11 guy? Why would they even bother? Congress would throw an absolute fit if they caught wind of it.

It's not because they can't. It's because they believe their own bullshit and get to do way too much cool Rambo/James Bond stuff outside of the United States.

Regarding the police. They're not exactly the enemy of the people. Our relationship with the cops is sort of complicated in this country. It's more that they're an institution with a lot of freedom and discretion, relatively poor training, low entrance standards, they have guns (and we have a lot of guns too), and they're loosely operated by a checkerboard of local and state agencies, rather than being a monolithic state entity.

A lot of the calls our police go on are mental health-related, and it burns a lot of cops out. Add that to poor de-escalation procedures and training, historical emphasis on policing of drug-related crimes in a way that that disproportionately affects minority communities, and well, there's trouble brewing.

If you ever get a chance (I know it's a cliche), but watch 'The Wire.' It's an HBO TV show that is pretty entertaining and does sort of go into a lot of the subtleties and problems of institutional policing in America.

I got a little sidetracked there, but in answer to 'what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?' I say because it's more boring and congress would throw a fit. And I wouldn't say it's because they're benevolent per-se, but there is a LOT of believe-your-own-bullshit patriotic sentiment in this country that is hard to understate. We have an almost fetishistic worship of our military, and the notion that they 'fight for our freedom' and 'protect' us. That also carries over into the intelligence community to a great degree.

But, with the ongoing efforts to overturn the most recent presidential election, and the President's usage of federal resources in the summer protests, I have to say a lot of us are having to rethink a lot of stuff.

[michaelt]

> The domestic United States is pretty boring by comparison. What, are they going to hassle the 7/11 guy? Why would they even bother?

Because a tough, macho president, who is also a rules-breaking maverick, decides he wants every protester who was anywhere near that burned-down police station locked up.

> Congress would throw an absolute fit if they caught wind of it.

You've got a very different impression of them to me, then.

[phobosanomaly]

"Prosecutors declined to pursue many of the cases because they concluded the protesters were exercising their basic civil rights."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/us/protests-lawsuits-arre...

'Ten days after leaving the White House with President Trump and walking with him across a park that had been forcibly cleared of protesters, the nation's most senior military officer is calling that excursion "a mistake."'

https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...

Despite the fact that the GOP will stand behind the president no matter what he does (even attempting a coup it seems), there is a younger generation (even within the GOP) who is a bit more grounded (e.g. Jeff Flake), and in ten years Mitch McConnell will be nothing more than a footnote in history.

If the courts keep throwing out Rudy's embarassingly-constructed cases, that fellow you're referring to is gone in a month, which is a pretty big difference from a puppet regime in the former Soviet Bloc.

Our country has been through a lot, but she has some life in her yet. Bear in mind that the younger generations have a very different political ideology than that of their parents. We are currently witnessing the death-throes of the political dominance of my parent's generation. They will slowly fade away and be replaced with a more forward-thinking and fresh approach to the same tired old problems. Glass half-full.

[Clubber]

Police have been harassing people for decades in the US. To assign it exclusively to Trump ignores this history and it also assumes it will go away in January. We just elected the guy who unapologetically wrote the crime bill and California's "top cop." Based on their resume, It will probably get worse under their leadership.

[officeplant]

>Regarding the police. They're not exactly the enemy of the people.

Given that policing in the US was founded to protect wealthy merchant types (later evolved into slave beating union busting monsters), they've always been the enemy of the people.

[phobosanomaly]

You're absolutely right. The institution of policing has for several hundred years been a team of enforcers for use by the ruling classes. It has historically been used to maintain social, economic, and racial disenfranchisement.

And there are plenty of cops who should absolutely not have a modicum of the power they now have. But, in 2020, it's important to recognize that 'police' are not a monolithic state entity, and there are plenty of good, kind officers who truly make an effort to 'protect and serve.' Let's get the bad ones the hell out of there, take some of the pressure off of the good ones so they're not acting as community mental health counselors, and maybe work to disarm folks on both sides so they don't have to enter every situation wondering if someone is going to murk them through a tinted window on a traffic stop.

It's a complicated situation that demands empathy and nuance on all sides.