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In effect, in the U.S. one risks punishment by the state for criticizing the police and there is no recourse against such punishment. We have de facto a situat

In effect, in the U.S. one risks punishment by the state for criticizing the police and there is no recourse against such punishment. We have de facto a situation like exists in Russia where criticizing the armed forces is illegal. Slowly, Americans will come to realize that we don’t have the rights we think we have. Spending a weekend in our hellish jails is enough to dissuade most people from exercising their rights. When stopped by the police the key thing to keep in mind is compliance. Accept any tickets, obey all commands (lawful or otherwise), answer the questions. If you disagree with the encounter take it up at a court hearing. Police can mess up your life with almost certain impunity and you should treat encounters with them with this in mind. Long term something will give. We will continue to march toward totalitarianism until it is no longer sustainable.

ars 4y ago
> In effect, in the U.S. one risks punishment by the state for criticizing the police and there is recourse against such punishment. He won at trial. If cops ever do it again he can point to the trial as clear prior evidence. This is about being arrested in the first place for something the cops think is illegal, but isn't. It's not about criticizing the police. This is also why he lost at the supreme court - the case was NOT about criticizing/parodying the police, it was about police conduct if they think something is illegal. I feel like a lot of people aren't realizing this distinction and making this case into something it is not.
- watwut 4y ago
  Well, all it takes for police to pretend they think parody is illegal to have right to jail you. It was about right to parody, just that police has to use a stupid excuse to punish it.
- sbuttgereit 4y ago
  > This is also why he lost at the supreme court This case isn't about free speech and rights suppression much the same way that he lost at the Supreme Court. The reality is he didn't lose at the Supreme Court... the Supreme Court didn't hear the case, they simply declined to hear the case. So he lost in a lower court and that ruling isn't being revisited. > the case was NOT about criticizing/parodying the police, it was about police conduct if they think something is illegal. Actually, this isn't correct either. The rejected case wasn't a free speech case nor even about what the police actually believed about something being legal/illegal. It was about whether or not he could sue the police department for their act. So the question you suggest the case is about hasn't been tested, though presumably it would have done so had he been able to sue. The question here was if your rights have been violated can you pursue a civil case where such questions as if the police acted in good faith (and that mattering) could be raised. Here the courts have said the question itself is out of order because there's no prior precedent of such a reasonably similar case having been pursued. This is why people that care about the individual rights implications are concerned about this case. If the precedent held by the courts says that you can't even raise the challenge because there's no previous precedent of such a challenge having been raised before, you prematurely answer all the questions without so much as a hearing. If that's true, then an agency that might violate your rights either out of malice or ignorance, will never have to do better. They are immune from challenges presumptively regardless of the legitimacy of the challenge relative to what the law says the rights are. To simplify the "right" becomes endangered of carrying any actual weight.
  - jfengel 4y ago
    Here the courts have said the question itself is out of order because there's no prior precedent of such a reasonably similar case having been pursued. How is that possible? Police have harassed people in every conceivable way since time immemorial, and people must have tried to sue over it. What made this case so utterly unprecedented that they couldn't even imagine hearing it?
    - aesh2Xa1 4y ago
      I don't know what made this particular case utterly unprecedented. However, one criticism of qualified immunity is that it protects law enforcement on the basis of otherwise irrelevant facts. https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/qualified-immunity-legal-practical-moral-failure https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/qualified-immunity-lega... > In practice, this legal standard is a huge hurdle for civil rights plaintiffs because it generally requires them to identify not just a clear legal rule but a prior case with functionally identical facts.
    - sbuttgereit 4y ago
      Whether prior precedent is possible or not really shouldn't be the issue. Such a standard itself is the problem: if your rights are violated in a legally novel way, why do courts pre-judge such a case against the victim? Sure, precedent matters, but when a legally new situation arises (a distinction which might be different than what a reasonable layperson would consider "new"), it seems the more morally correct approach is to hear the case and set precedent. Courts do that all the time in other matters so this distinction in judging government agent's actions is particularly absurd.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      If you aren't allowed to sue the police without precedent, precedent will never be created, so you can never sue the police. There's a bootstrapping problem. It's just another way that the justice systems infatuation with "precedent", as if that's any way to democratically decide things, fucks each and every one of us constantly.
- syzarian 4y ago
  The trauma caused by being arrested and spending time in jail waiting for the system to process you is already done. Winning at court is irrelevant. What is instilled in the people is the normalization of police terrorism. We don’t have rights if exercising them means risking a traumatic encounter with police with police being immune to any consequences.
joelfried 4y ago
[flagged]
- ars 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - Clubber 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - judge2020 4y ago
    > But you make it like it's "white guaranteed fine", "black guaranteed death". That's hardly true. I doubt the commenter meant this sort of binary logic, Especially since OP says "likely" - aka. more likely to be shot than the other group.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  Twice as many whites as blacks are shot to death by police
  - BEEdwards 4y ago
    You know there are more than twice as many whites right? that statistic doesn't mean what you're trying to imply...
    - throwawayben 4y ago
      now do it per police interaction
    - mtrower 4y ago
      That statistic doesn't mean anything obvious at all. It might mean something, but it sure as hell isn't obvious (unless you have an agenda to push, then whatever you're interested in is "obvious" and "true").
  - 4y ago
midoridensha 4y ago
>Long term something will give. We will continue to march toward totalitarianism until it is no longer sustainable. That can be a very long time. The Soviet system lasted for many decades before it finally collapsed (and what's there now is even worse, though not for the satellite nations that freed themselves from Russian dominance), and the Chinese system is still going strong. I don't see North Korea in danger of imminent collapse either. I think the idea that totalitarianism isn't "sustainable" is a fallacy. Long-term, nothing is truly sustainable; every governmental system falls apart at some point.
- kelipso 4y ago
  It's not even like the USSR collapsed because it was totalitarian or anything, it was mostly economic factors.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    It was economic, but the common theory is that the totalitarian system was so inefficient that this caused the economic factors that made the system collapse, and that a free-market system would have avoided this. China, by contrast, has a totalitarian system but a much more free-market economic system (a lot of big companies are all or partially state-owned, but the economy as a whole is not centrally planned like in the Soviet system).
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      Your point is that central planning was a failure. That's mostly orthogonal to the regime, even if it's easier to do with a totalitarian system. We could imagine central planning with a democratic system, one could even argue that we have bits and pieces of central planning in most of our governments, especially in agriculture and fields that make no money but are critical to a nation.
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        >That's mostly orthogonal to the regime, even if it's easier to do with a totalitarian system. Yeah, that's basically my point: that totalitarianism isn't necessarily "unsustainable" at all. The US could become totalitarian and stay that way for centuries.
mtrower 4y ago
> Spending a weekend in our hellish jails Have you actually spent a weekend in jail?
- syzarian 4y ago
  No. But I know people who spent time in Cook county jail. I know that in any jail in the U.S. a prisoner’s well being is at the whim of those in charge. There are lots of examples of dead, beaten, and otherwise traumatized prisoners. There are also examples of people who did just fine in jail.
  - mtrower 4y ago
    Fair. > There are also examples of people who did just fine in jail. Most, probably, from what I've seen. At least in my area. However... > a prisoner’s well being is at the whim of those in charge. Don't forget the other inmates! My cousin's cellmate, in for murder... beat the everloving bejesus out of some dude in the gym, some days before said cousin arrived (honestly he probably deserved it, but that's beside the point here). Why he was still roaming around freely with the rest of the pod, I never did discover.
    - syzarian 4y ago
      Getting beat by other inmates is part of the “at the whim of those in charge” comment I made. The government can provide enough resources to largely prevent this type of violence from being common but chooses not pay to do so. It’s part of what makes our jails hellish in some cases.

ars 4y ago

> In effect, in the U.S. one risks punishment by the state for criticizing the police and there is recourse against such punishment. He won at trial. If cops ever do it again he can point to the trial as clear prior evidence. This is about being arrested in the first place for something the cops think is illegal, but isn't. It's not about criticizing the police. This is also why he lost at the supreme court - the case was NOT about criticizing/parodying the police, it was about police conduct if they think something is illegal. I feel like a lot of people aren't realizing this distinction and making this case into something it is not.

watwut 4y ago
Well, all it takes for police to pretend they think parody is illegal to have right to jail you. It was about right to parody, just that police has to use a stupid excuse to punish it.
sbuttgereit 4y ago
> This is also why he lost at the supreme court This case isn't about free speech and rights suppression much the same way that he lost at the Supreme Court. The reality is he didn't lose at the Supreme Court... the Supreme Court didn't hear the case, they simply declined to hear the case. So he lost in a lower court and that ruling isn't being revisited. > the case was NOT about criticizing/parodying the police, it was about police conduct if they think something is illegal. Actually, this isn't correct either. The rejected case wasn't a free speech case nor even about what the police actually believed about something being legal/illegal. It was about whether or not he could sue the police department for their act. So the question you suggest the case is about hasn't been tested, though presumably it would have done so had he been able to sue. The question here was if your rights have been violated can you pursue a civil case where such questions as if the police acted in good faith (and that mattering) could be raised. Here the courts have said the question itself is out of order because there's no prior precedent of such a reasonably similar case having been pursued. This is why people that care about the individual rights implications are concerned about this case. If the precedent held by the courts says that you can't even raise the challenge because there's no previous precedent of such a challenge having been raised before, you prematurely answer all the questions without so much as a hearing. If that's true, then an agency that might violate your rights either out of malice or ignorance, will never have to do better. They are immune from challenges presumptively regardless of the legitimacy of the challenge relative to what the law says the rights are. To simplify the "right" becomes endangered of carrying any actual weight.
- jfengel 4y ago
  Here the courts have said the question itself is out of order because there's no prior precedent of such a reasonably similar case having been pursued. How is that possible? Police have harassed people in every conceivable way since time immemorial, and people must have tried to sue over it. What made this case so utterly unprecedented that they couldn't even imagine hearing it?
  - aesh2Xa1 4y ago
    I don't know what made this particular case utterly unprecedented. However, one criticism of qualified immunity is that it protects law enforcement on the basis of otherwise irrelevant facts. https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/qualified-immunity-legal-practical-moral-failure https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/qualified-immunity-lega... > In practice, this legal standard is a huge hurdle for civil rights plaintiffs because it generally requires them to identify not just a clear legal rule but a prior case with functionally identical facts.
  - sbuttgereit 4y ago
    Whether prior precedent is possible or not really shouldn't be the issue. Such a standard itself is the problem: if your rights are violated in a legally novel way, why do courts pre-judge such a case against the victim? Sure, precedent matters, but when a legally new situation arises (a distinction which might be different than what a reasonable layperson would consider "new"), it seems the more morally correct approach is to hear the case and set precedent. Courts do that all the time in other matters so this distinction in judging government agent's actions is particularly absurd.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    If you aren't allowed to sue the police without precedent, precedent will never be created, so you can never sue the police. There's a bootstrapping problem. It's just another way that the justice systems infatuation with "precedent", as if that's any way to democratically decide things, fucks each and every one of us constantly.
syzarian 4y ago
The trauma caused by being arrested and spending time in jail waiting for the system to process you is already done. Winning at court is irrelevant. What is instilled in the people is the normalization of police terrorism. We don’t have rights if exercising them means risking a traumatic encounter with police with police being immune to any consequences.

joelfried 4y ago

[flagged]

ars 4y ago
[flagged]
- Clubber 4y ago
  [flagged]
- judge2020 4y ago
  > But you make it like it's "white guaranteed fine", "black guaranteed death". That's hardly true. I doubt the commenter meant this sort of binary logic, Especially since OP says "likely" - aka. more likely to be shot than the other group.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
Twice as many whites as blacks are shot to death by police
- BEEdwards 4y ago
  You know there are more than twice as many whites right? that statistic doesn't mean what you're trying to imply...
  - throwawayben 4y ago
    now do it per police interaction
  - mtrower 4y ago
    That statistic doesn't mean anything obvious at all. It might mean something, but it sure as hell isn't obvious (unless you have an agenda to push, then whatever you're interested in is "obvious" and "true").
- 4y ago

midoridensha 4y ago

>Long term something will give. We will continue to march toward totalitarianism until it is no longer sustainable. That can be a very long time. The Soviet system lasted for many decades before it finally collapsed (and what's there now is even worse, though not for the satellite nations that freed themselves from Russian dominance), and the Chinese system is still going strong. I don't see North Korea in danger of imminent collapse either. I think the idea that totalitarianism isn't "sustainable" is a fallacy. Long-term, nothing is truly sustainable; every governmental system falls apart at some point.

kelipso 4y ago
It's not even like the USSR collapsed because it was totalitarian or anything, it was mostly economic factors.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  It was economic, but the common theory is that the totalitarian system was so inefficient that this caused the economic factors that made the system collapse, and that a free-market system would have avoided this. China, by contrast, has a totalitarian system but a much more free-market economic system (a lot of big companies are all or partially state-owned, but the economy as a whole is not centrally planned like in the Soviet system).
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    Your point is that central planning was a failure. That's mostly orthogonal to the regime, even if it's easier to do with a totalitarian system. We could imagine central planning with a democratic system, one could even argue that we have bits and pieces of central planning in most of our governments, especially in agriculture and fields that make no money but are critical to a nation.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      >That's mostly orthogonal to the regime, even if it's easier to do with a totalitarian system. Yeah, that's basically my point: that totalitarianism isn't necessarily "unsustainable" at all. The US could become totalitarian and stay that way for centuries.

mtrower 4y ago

> Spending a weekend in our hellish jails Have you actually spent a weekend in jail?

syzarian 4y ago
No. But I know people who spent time in Cook county jail. I know that in any jail in the U.S. a prisoner’s well being is at the whim of those in charge. There are lots of examples of dead, beaten, and otherwise traumatized prisoners. There are also examples of people who did just fine in jail.
- mtrower 4y ago
  Fair. > There are also examples of people who did just fine in jail. Most, probably, from what I've seen. At least in my area. However... > a prisoner’s well being is at the whim of those in charge. Don't forget the other inmates! My cousin's cellmate, in for murder... beat the everloving bejesus out of some dude in the gym, some days before said cousin arrived (honestly he probably deserved it, but that's beside the point here). Why he was still roaming around freely with the rest of the pod, I never did discover.
  - syzarian 4y ago
    Getting beat by other inmates is part of the “at the whim of those in charge” comment I made. The government can provide enough resources to largely prevent this type of violence from being common but chooses not pay to do so. It’s part of what makes our jails hellish in some cases.