10 ms·

The Making of the American Gulag

68 points by anarbadalov 7y ago

Clubber 7y ago
We need to let the USA PATRIOT act expire. They renew it every year. It should be a top political theme in 2020. This would at least be a good start. The fact that Kamala Harris is tanking after Tulsi described her as a prosecutor is heartening. Historically, prosecutors benefited from perverting the justice system because they were "tough on crime." GenX (my generation) is too small to do much politically, but the Millennials will be the next big power in US politics, handed over from the Boomers. Millennials, make sure you not only fight to preserve every freedom, but fight to regain ones we've lost since the Cold War. It's getting pretty dark in the US.
- ASalazarMX 7y ago
  > GenX (my generation) is too small to do much politically Wait, didn't the boomers become famous for having lots of kids? GenX should be the biggest. Edit: It's not the biggest: https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-generation/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-...
  - ThetaOneOne 7y ago
    Boomers did have a lot of kids, the millennials. GenX is the in between generation.
    - goto11 7y ago
      The boomers are the result of the post-war baby boom. They are known for being numerous, not for getting particularly many children themselves. If anything, millennials would be their grandchildren.
      - ameister14 7y ago
        If you were born in 1955, you are a baby boomer. If you were born in 1985, you are a millennial. 1985-1955=30. 30 isn't the normal age for a grandparent.
        Clubber 7y ago
        Early Boomer: 1946 Early GenX: 1966 Early Millenial: 1986 40 years, it fits just fine when you don't take the latest possible boomer and the youngest possible millennial.
        ameister14 7y ago
        Latest possible boomer is early 60's. I took pretty much smack dab in the middle of the boomers. Millennial starts in what, '81-82? so about 16-20 years between, which is generation X. The earliest possible boomer is early 50's when the latest millennial is born. The latest possible boomer is 19 when the earliest millennial is born.
        goto11 7y ago
        FWIW Wikipedia agrees with you. I thought millennial were later.
    - wyclif 7y ago
      Yes. Another way of looking at it is that GenX are the children of people too young to be members of the Greatest Generation or participate in events surrounding WWII, but too old to be baby boomers.
      - isoskeles 7y ago
        > Generation X (or Gen X) is the demographic cohort following the baby boomers and preceding the Millennials. Demographers and researchers typically use birth years ranging from the early-to-mid 1960s to the early 1980s, with 1965 to 1980 a widely accepted definition.
  - makerofspoons 7y ago
    The Greatest Generation was famous for having lots of kids, resulting in the (baby) boomers. GenX is smaller than the millenials and GenZ in the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-generation/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-...
  - goto11 7y ago
    The boomer are named so because they are the result of the post-war baby boom. This is why there is so many boomers!
  - Clubber 7y ago
    The Boomers were the kids that WWII vets were famous for having. They were born in a baby boom during / after WWII, thus the name.
- nradov 7y ago
  Size of a generation only matters if they actually vote.
  - nooyurrsdey 7y ago
    I think the point was that older generations tend to vote, so millenials will vote and assume power in 20 years.
    - at-fates-hands 7y ago
      Most don't vote now, which is one of the primary reasons why Trump was elected. Sure, they swamp social media with their anger, demonstrate, disrupt conservative speaking engagements, burn and vandalize private property and call for violence in the streets and revolution but have never really voted in huge numbers: In a number of other key battleground states, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, it looks like millennials didn't show up at the polls in the same levels they did for President Obama, and that was a problem for Democrats. The millennial coalition Obama created just didn't translate to Clinton, despite the Beyonce and Katy Perry concerts. In many of these states, Clinton still won the young vote, but her margin of victory was substantially smaller. In Florida, it was 16 percentage points less than President Obama's; Wisconsin, 20 percentage points smaller; and Pennsylvania, 19 percentage points less. And I believe most younger voters once they have to pay taxes, raise a family, and start building their retirement and saving for their kids college, become more Conservative and less "progressive" or Liberal.
      - klank 7y ago
        > And I believe most younger voters once they have to pay taxes, raise a family, and start building their retirement and saving for their kids college, become more Conservative and less "progressive" or Liberal. Is that accurate? It's conventional wisdom but I've never seen it convincingly demonstrated.
        Clubber 7y ago
        I think the confusing part is he is viewing a person as either liberal or conservative as a whole. I, and I assume many people take liberal or conservative positions based on the policy, not as a denomination. Also, "liberal" and "conservative" mean different things to different people. If someone were to ask me if I was liberal or conservative, I'd have to ask them, "for which policy?"
- 87er43 7y ago
  > We need to let the USA PATRIOT act expire. Why would they ever let this happen? It's an excuse to own you. But let's say they did "let it expire", to put on some political pony show for the concerned voter, would they then stop spying on you, because of the new rules? It's a stretch, but let's imagine that the agencies now decide to "follow the rules". They really miss that Patriot Act though! All they'd really need to get their favorite Act back is another major terrorist attack.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Did you just condemn Harris for being a prosecutor without any regard for how she did the job? Is get because you believe that the current criminal justice system is fundamentally wrong and would be better completely abolished?
  - Clubber 7y ago
    >Did you just condemn Harris for being a prosecutor without any regard for how she did the job? No, Tulsi Gabbard did during the first Democratic primary debate. >Is get because you believe that the current criminal justice system is fundamentally wrong and would be better completely abolished? No, I don't think it's fundamentally flawed. I feel prosecutors need a better check and balance against shady tactics like over charging to scare (innocent?) people into a plea. I also think the public defender's office should get the same budget as the prosecutor, because .. justice.
sailfast 7y ago
Let me get this straight - this author is trying to tie post-war US Spending to counter Soviet policies, fear of communist expansion, and the cold war, to the current state of police budgets and behavior in the United States? (so they can use the name Gulag in the title of the piece? - just speculating...) First: It's completely within the power of communities to NOT fund their police, but most of them want to fund the police. I highly doubt it's because they believe their police are building gulags / exhibiting secret police behavior, or because, you know, "no matter what protect the thin blue line because we're conditioned as a police state!" Second: Militarization of the police is much more a result of the recent terrorist attacks and surplus equipment and military training from the Iraq / Afghanistan wars than anything having to do with the cold war. (Focus on response to mass shootings with automatic weapons, requiring / wanting to wear body armor, etc vs. community policing approaches have different perceived risk profiles) Third: I'll give you the prison industrial complex is a thing, but there is simply no data in the article presented about overall private prison usage vs. publicly funded prisons. I think private prisons should be outlawed, but a quick look yields 8.5% of people incarcerated are in private prisons. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-prisons-united-states/ https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso... The hyperbole in this article is offputting, doesn't help the purpose of the author, and honestly misses so many facts about postwar military spending and WHY that it boggles the mind of any reader with any sort of background in this. Hard pass next time.
- xnakq 7y ago
  Until recently it was common among educated people to use generally understood exaggerations to make a point. No one around 2000-2010 would read the article as a) diminishing the sufferings in the actual Gulags or b) an insinuation that the U.S. has reached the state of actual Gulags. How would one read classical European literature if this convention is not understood.
- kilo_bravo_3 7y ago
  >Second: Militarization of the police is much more a result of the recent terrorist attacks and surplus equipment and military training from the Iraq / Afghanistan wars than anything having to do with the cold war. The thing I don't get about the "militarization" of police is that: 1. Police responses to mass civil disturbances is probably less militarized today than it has ever been in the history of the United States. See: Philly police dropping actual bombs on citizens, all of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, George Washington himself sending several regiments of the newly-formed US Army to pacify tax protestors, and everything in between. 2. Everywhere that keeps records going back several decades has seen police shootings decrease. In New York City in particular both shootings and deaths have decreased at a rate that exceeds the drop in crime and are the lowest they've ever been-- and NYPD is one of the most "militarized" police forces in the US (so I've been told). In 1972, NYPD fired 2,510 shots during 994 incidents, injuring 145 subjects and killing 66. In 2017, NYPD fired 52 shots during 242 incidents, injuring 9 subjects and killing 10. 3. Surplus military equipment has always been given to police forces. Some police forces used to have belt-fed machine guns and hand grenades in their armories. A libertarian publication, Reason, used to maintain a meticulously-curated list of SWAT raids, with handy-dandy links to purchase their publications on the downward spiral of American society and the trampling of the rights of every citizen at the hands of the militarized police, which they terminated around 2012 when their own graphs showed incidents of police brutality falling off a cliff. Today, the most police forces have to report every time they strike, tase, or shoot, a subject. Back in "the good old days" when police "weren't militarized" they just sprayed bullets at people, dumped the corpses at the morgue, and went out for a drink. One hundred years ago, during the May Day Riots and Red Summer of 1919 the police used the actual, literal, military (including WWI tanks) to kill protestors (mainly socialists and African Americans). When were the police (and the overall response to civil unrest by authorities) LESS militarized than they are today?
rpmisms 7y ago
It's going to take a catastrophic event to disrupt the MIC and current "Everything is fine" attitudes. The 2016 election helped, as many people realized that maybe lots of government power isn't a good idea, especially if you don't like who's in office. I wonder what the next disruption will be.
rcktmrtn 7y ago
> The idea that fundamental differences in approaches to incarceration drove the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union strikes an odd chord from our current vantage point. Today 2.3 million people are locked up in the United States, and an additional 4.5 million are on parole or probation, for a total of around 2 percent of the population under state control. If you're looking for the "fundamental differences in incarceration" that separate Gulag from prison, maybe it would be wise to also consider how executions and severity of forced labor come into play. This statistic generated by adding number of people on parole to people locked up strikes me as meaningless BS. I'm not happy that the US seems to be developing police state tendencies and a lot of the rest of this article rang true, but based on how disingenuous the intro seems I can't help but assume the whole thing is trash.
Merrill 7y ago
I think there is a fundamental difference. Gulags destroy the body through forced labor. Prisons destroy the mind through forced idleness.

68 points by anarbadalov 7y ago

We need to let the USA PATRIOT act expire. They renew it every year. It should be a top political theme in 2020. This would at least be a good start. The fact that Kamala Harris is tanking after Tulsi described her as a prosecutor is heartening. Historically, prosecutors benefited from perverting the justice system because they were "tough on crime." GenX (my generation) is too small to do much politically, but the Millennials will be the next big power in US politics, handed over from the Boomers. Millennials, make sure you not only fight to preserve every freedom, but fight to regain ones we've lost since the Cold War. It's getting pretty dark in the US.

ASalazarMX 7y ago
> GenX (my generation) is too small to do much politically Wait, didn't the boomers become famous for having lots of kids? GenX should be the biggest. Edit: It's not the biggest: https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-generation/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-...
- ThetaOneOne 7y ago
  Boomers did have a lot of kids, the millennials. GenX is the in between generation.
  - goto11 7y ago
    The boomers are the result of the post-war baby boom. They are known for being numerous, not for getting particularly many children themselves. If anything, millennials would be their grandchildren.
    - ameister14 7y ago
      If you were born in 1955, you are a baby boomer. If you were born in 1985, you are a millennial. 1985-1955=30. 30 isn't the normal age for a grandparent.
      - Clubber 7y ago
        Early Boomer: 1946 Early GenX: 1966 Early Millenial: 1986 40 years, it fits just fine when you don't take the latest possible boomer and the youngest possible millennial.
        ameister14 7y ago
        Latest possible boomer is early 60's. I took pretty much smack dab in the middle of the boomers. Millennial starts in what, '81-82? so about 16-20 years between, which is generation X. The earliest possible boomer is early 50's when the latest millennial is born. The latest possible boomer is 19 when the earliest millennial is born.
      - goto11 7y ago
        FWIW Wikipedia agrees with you. I thought millennial were later.
  - wyclif 7y ago
    Yes. Another way of looking at it is that GenX are the children of people too young to be members of the Greatest Generation or participate in events surrounding WWII, but too old to be baby boomers.
    - isoskeles 7y ago
      > Generation X (or Gen X) is the demographic cohort following the baby boomers and preceding the Millennials. Demographers and researchers typically use birth years ranging from the early-to-mid 1960s to the early 1980s, with 1965 to 1980 a widely accepted definition.
- makerofspoons 7y ago
  The Greatest Generation was famous for having lots of kids, resulting in the (baby) boomers. GenX is smaller than the millenials and GenZ in the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-generation/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-...
- goto11 7y ago
  The boomer are named so because they are the result of the post-war baby boom. This is why there is so many boomers!
- Clubber 7y ago
  The Boomers were the kids that WWII vets were famous for having. They were born in a baby boom during / after WWII, thus the name.
nradov 7y ago
Size of a generation only matters if they actually vote.
- nooyurrsdey 7y ago
  I think the point was that older generations tend to vote, so millenials will vote and assume power in 20 years.
  - at-fates-hands 7y ago
    Most don't vote now, which is one of the primary reasons why Trump was elected. Sure, they swamp social media with their anger, demonstrate, disrupt conservative speaking engagements, burn and vandalize private property and call for violence in the streets and revolution but have never really voted in huge numbers: In a number of other key battleground states, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, it looks like millennials didn't show up at the polls in the same levels they did for President Obama, and that was a problem for Democrats. The millennial coalition Obama created just didn't translate to Clinton, despite the Beyonce and Katy Perry concerts. In many of these states, Clinton still won the young vote, but her margin of victory was substantially smaller. In Florida, it was 16 percentage points less than President Obama's; Wisconsin, 20 percentage points smaller; and Pennsylvania, 19 percentage points less. And I believe most younger voters once they have to pay taxes, raise a family, and start building their retirement and saving for their kids college, become more Conservative and less "progressive" or Liberal.
    - klank 7y ago
      > And I believe most younger voters once they have to pay taxes, raise a family, and start building their retirement and saving for their kids college, become more Conservative and less "progressive" or Liberal. Is that accurate? It's conventional wisdom but I've never seen it convincingly demonstrated.
      - Clubber 7y ago
        I think the confusing part is he is viewing a person as either liberal or conservative as a whole. I, and I assume many people take liberal or conservative positions based on the policy, not as a denomination. Also, "liberal" and "conservative" mean different things to different people. If someone were to ask me if I was liberal or conservative, I'd have to ask them, "for which policy?"
87er43 7y ago
> We need to let the USA PATRIOT act expire. Why would they ever let this happen? It's an excuse to own you. But let's say they did "let it expire", to put on some political pony show for the concerned voter, would they then stop spying on you, because of the new rules? It's a stretch, but let's imagine that the agencies now decide to "follow the rules". They really miss that Patriot Act though! All they'd really need to get their favorite Act back is another major terrorist attack.
lonelappde 7y ago
Did you just condemn Harris for being a prosecutor without any regard for how she did the job? Is get because you believe that the current criminal justice system is fundamentally wrong and would be better completely abolished?
- Clubber 7y ago
  >Did you just condemn Harris for being a prosecutor without any regard for how she did the job? No, Tulsi Gabbard did during the first Democratic primary debate. >Is get because you believe that the current criminal justice system is fundamentally wrong and would be better completely abolished? No, I don't think it's fundamentally flawed. I feel prosecutors need a better check and balance against shady tactics like over charging to scare (innocent?) people into a plea. I also think the public defender's office should get the same budget as the prosecutor, because .. justice.

sailfast 7y ago

Let me get this straight - this author is trying to tie post-war US Spending to counter Soviet policies, fear of communist expansion, and the cold war, to the current state of police budgets and behavior in the United States? (so they can use the name Gulag in the title of the piece? - just speculating...) First: It's completely within the power of communities to NOT fund their police, but most of them want to fund the police. I highly doubt it's because they believe their police are building gulags / exhibiting secret police behavior, or because, you know, "no matter what protect the thin blue line because we're conditioned as a police state!" Second: Militarization of the police is much more a result of the recent terrorist attacks and surplus equipment and military training from the Iraq / Afghanistan wars than anything having to do with the cold war. (Focus on response to mass shootings with automatic weapons, requiring / wanting to wear body armor, etc vs. community policing approaches have different perceived risk profiles) Third: I'll give you the prison industrial complex is a thing, but there is simply no data in the article presented about overall private prison usage vs. publicly funded prisons. I think private prisons should be outlawed, but a quick look yields 8.5% of people incarcerated are in private prisons. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-prisons-united-states/ https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso... The hyperbole in this article is offputting, doesn't help the purpose of the author, and honestly misses so many facts about postwar military spending and WHY that it boggles the mind of any reader with any sort of background in this. Hard pass next time.

xnakq 7y ago
Until recently it was common among educated people to use generally understood exaggerations to make a point. No one around 2000-2010 would read the article as a) diminishing the sufferings in the actual Gulags or b) an insinuation that the U.S. has reached the state of actual Gulags. How would one read classical European literature if this convention is not understood.
kilo_bravo_3 7y ago
>Second: Militarization of the police is much more a result of the recent terrorist attacks and surplus equipment and military training from the Iraq / Afghanistan wars than anything having to do with the cold war. The thing I don't get about the "militarization" of police is that: 1. Police responses to mass civil disturbances is probably less militarized today than it has ever been in the history of the United States. See: Philly police dropping actual bombs on citizens, all of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, George Washington himself sending several regiments of the newly-formed US Army to pacify tax protestors, and everything in between. 2. Everywhere that keeps records going back several decades has seen police shootings decrease. In New York City in particular both shootings and deaths have decreased at a rate that exceeds the drop in crime and are the lowest they've ever been-- and NYPD is one of the most "militarized" police forces in the US (so I've been told). In 1972, NYPD fired 2,510 shots during 994 incidents, injuring 145 subjects and killing 66. In 2017, NYPD fired 52 shots during 242 incidents, injuring 9 subjects and killing 10. 3. Surplus military equipment has always been given to police forces. Some police forces used to have belt-fed machine guns and hand grenades in their armories. A libertarian publication, Reason, used to maintain a meticulously-curated list of SWAT raids, with handy-dandy links to purchase their publications on the downward spiral of American society and the trampling of the rights of every citizen at the hands of the militarized police, which they terminated around 2012 when their own graphs showed incidents of police brutality falling off a cliff. Today, the most police forces have to report every time they strike, tase, or shoot, a subject. Back in "the good old days" when police "weren't militarized" they just sprayed bullets at people, dumped the corpses at the morgue, and went out for a drink. One hundred years ago, during the May Day Riots and Red Summer of 1919 the police used the actual, literal, military (including WWI tanks) to kill protestors (mainly socialists and African Americans). When were the police (and the overall response to civil unrest by authorities) LESS militarized than they are today?

rpmisms 7y ago

It's going to take a catastrophic event to disrupt the MIC and current "Everything is fine" attitudes. The 2016 election helped, as many people realized that maybe lots of government power isn't a good idea, especially if you don't like who's in office. I wonder what the next disruption will be.

rcktmrtn 7y ago

> The idea that fundamental differences in approaches to incarceration drove the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union strikes an odd chord from our current vantage point. Today 2.3 million people are locked up in the United States, and an additional 4.5 million are on parole or probation, for a total of around 2 percent of the population under state control. If you're looking for the "fundamental differences in incarceration" that separate Gulag from prison, maybe it would be wise to also consider how executions and severity of forced labor come into play. This statistic generated by adding number of people on parole to people locked up strikes me as meaningless BS. I'm not happy that the US seems to be developing police state tendencies and a lot of the rest of this article rang true, but based on how disingenuous the intro seems I can't help but assume the whole thing is trash.

Merrill 7y ago

I think there is a fundamental difference. Gulags destroy the body through forced labor. Prisons destroy the mind through forced idleness.