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Just posting this here in reply to a comment whose thread was flagged. Context is "whose definition of criminal should we use". How about "people openly flaunt

Just posting this here in reply to a comment whose thread was flagged. Context is "whose definition of criminal should we use". How about "people openly flaunting assault weapons"? As someone who lived in Rio most of their life, I think that's a good line to draw. Opinions filled with "human rights" concerns from people far removed are probably ethically and morally correct, which is... cute. We're fighting an Urban War over here. This is a Concrete Jungle. This is a crazy post-apocalyptic situation to which most people in Rio grew accustomed to while most people outside Rio can barely picture. As a police officer once told my wife as she was leaving her house in Rocinha and stopped to be patted down and inquired why was she being selected: – Mam, do you know where you are? You are not in in Los Angeles. You are not in Paris. My moral qualms went out the window around the same time my grandmother was murdered by being thrown off a bridge in Aterro do Flamengo.

drewblaisdell 7y ago
> Opinions filled with "human rights" concerns from people far removed are probably ethically and morally correct, which is... cute. We're fighting an Urban War over here. War is always a good excuse to ignore ethical concerns.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  > War is always a good excuse to ignore ethical concerns. On Both sides
- ufo 7y ago
  I think it is important to point out that this point of view that "human rights" (with the quotation marks) are something that exists solely to favor "bad guys", at the expense of "upstanding citizens", is one one of the central points of alt-right rhetoric in Brazil right now.
the_jpg 7y ago
Everything that you said is right, my problem with this kind of policy is that they sell it as the solution, I think that is better to fight organized crime with intelligence instead of with raw force. The weapons and the drugs that finance the traffic do not come from the poor communities, the crime in rio is deep within the society killing the poor that is already marginalized it’s not a soluction. I agree with you on the other side, people with weapons should be treated as the threat that they are, but the public policy should not be just “kill theses guys and we are good”.
- brutally-honest 7y ago
  I agree with you. Trust me, in ordinary contexts I'd be the last person defending the PMERJ or the Military Intervention, it's all wrong and rotten and not a real public policy. However on HN the discourse has the exact opposite bias. People have this idea of morality that's based on their conceptions and not directly on what's happening around them.
bliblah 7y ago
You imply that the police officers gain nothing from this state of affairs. In my own experience, a lot police officers grow up in the same hoods as the same criminals they pursue and the most corrupt ones use this to leverage relationships within gangs for money. Just to give you an idea, an acquaintance of mine never knew his grandfather was in a federal prison, he was told it was a secure retirement home. The grandfather's crime was a dirty cop that had literal death squads killing people in cold blood for years and making money off dead dealers. He used the chaos in the streets to line his pockets with money and silence the people who tried to snitch on him.
dictum 7y ago
> We're fighting an Urban War over here As soon as you start unpacking why and how you got into an urban war, you'll approach the fussy philosophical questions raised by the human rights crowd.
diego_moita 7y ago
In the movie Platoon they say: "The first casualty of war is innocence". I can understand that. In despair, a lot of people in my Brazilian family think like you. But the problem is that this mentality opens a wide space for a whole different class of criminals. And that's what is going on in Rio : small business owners decided to bribe police officers in exchange of security. These corrupt policemen wiped away ordinary criminals but then they just replaced those, became organized crime by themselves, practicing drug traffic, extortion, monopolies in natural gas distribution and all sorts of illegal activities. In Rio they're called militias. In the end, there's no alternative to the rule of the law. In the long run, a lynch mob mentality will only create bigger problems on the long run.

drewblaisdell 7y ago

> Opinions filled with "human rights" concerns from people far removed are probably ethically and morally correct, which is... cute. We're fighting an Urban War over here. War is always a good excuse to ignore ethical concerns.

hutzlibu 7y ago
> War is always a good excuse to ignore ethical concerns. On Both sides
ufo 7y ago
I think it is important to point out that this point of view that "human rights" (with the quotation marks) are something that exists solely to favor "bad guys", at the expense of "upstanding citizens", is one one of the central points of alt-right rhetoric in Brazil right now.

the_jpg 7y ago

Everything that you said is right, my problem with this kind of policy is that they sell it as the solution, I think that is better to fight organized crime with intelligence instead of with raw force. The weapons and the drugs that finance the traffic do not come from the poor communities, the crime in rio is deep within the society killing the poor that is already marginalized it’s not a soluction. I agree with you on the other side, people with weapons should be treated as the threat that they are, but the public policy should not be just “kill theses guys and we are good”.

brutally-honest 7y ago
I agree with you. Trust me, in ordinary contexts I'd be the last person defending the PMERJ or the Military Intervention, it's all wrong and rotten and not a real public policy. However on HN the discourse has the exact opposite bias. People have this idea of morality that's based on their conceptions and not directly on what's happening around them.

bliblah 7y ago

You imply that the police officers gain nothing from this state of affairs. In my own experience, a lot police officers grow up in the same hoods as the same criminals they pursue and the most corrupt ones use this to leverage relationships within gangs for money. Just to give you an idea, an acquaintance of mine never knew his grandfather was in a federal prison, he was told it was a secure retirement home. The grandfather's crime was a dirty cop that had literal death squads killing people in cold blood for years and making money off dead dealers. He used the chaos in the streets to line his pockets with money and silence the people who tried to snitch on him.

dictum 7y ago

> We're fighting an Urban War over here As soon as you start unpacking why and how you got into an urban war, you'll approach the fussy philosophical questions raised by the human rights crowd.

diego_moita 7y ago

In the movie Platoon they say: "The first casualty of war is innocence". I can understand that. In despair, a lot of people in my Brazilian family think like you. But the problem is that this mentality opens a wide space for a whole different class of criminals. And that's what is going on in Rio : small business owners decided to bribe police officers in exchange of security. These corrupt policemen wiped away ordinary criminals but then they just replaced those, became organized crime by themselves, practicing drug traffic, extortion, monopolies in natural gas distribution and all sorts of illegal activities. In Rio they're called militias. In the end, there's no alternative to the rule of the law. In the long run, a lynch mob mentality will only create bigger problems on the long run.