5 ms·

The last time I had police knocking at my door, it was a lot more than two, and they were readying their battering ram when I opened, and then immediately swarm

• nate_meurer 3mo ago
  > giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia. This only makes sense if you have no concept of "future", wherein different, less reasonable people can gain power. This should be especially obvious in Germany, where an adversarial relationship with the state can easily be had by merely criticizing it.
  • fyredge 3mo ago
    The solution then seems to be holding people in power accountable, no? Digital ID or not, the situation won't improve until we get actual representation that works for the people.
    • cnd78A 3mo ago
      > The solution, then, seems to be holding people in power accountable, no? The problem is that this is an extremely difficult step to achieve, because it does not simply depend on the will of the people. It depends on cultural evolution. Human beings are not naturally rational; like other species, we are driven by evolutionary processes that are often irrational and self-interested. Most countries—and, more specifically, the majority of their citizens—have not yet reached this stage of civilizational development. The French are far from it, and I believe the Germans are as well. Despite belonging to the generation that emerged from a relatively recent period of cultural barbarism, Germany is currently supporting what is considered as the greatest genocide and one of the gravest sets of war crimes of our time. So I would not overestimate the level of civilization of a population whose majority appears unconcerned by what I see as such an obvious moral failure. In my view, one of the roots of human barbarism is the tendency to overestimate either human nature itself or the moral achievements of one's own culture.
      • fyredge 3mo ago
        > Most countries—and, more specifically, the majority of their citizens—have not yet reached this stage of civilizational development. While I do agree, I don't believe that the reason is barbarism. My view is that the general public have been imbued with a sense of smallness. We see powerful men twist the world to suit themselves and yet we can't do anything ourselves, alone. The solution is to embrace our agency and organize. Collective action is necessary to counter authoritative threats. We can sit behind our desk all day and espouse the virtues of voting and to vote with out wallet, but fundamentally, they are individual actions with little power. Western Europe is slightly better in this case, where labour rights are better enforced and people have more free time. Sure, the shops are closed too early for our convenience, but that gives people the time and opportunity to organize locally for the betterment of themselves. But yes, we do need a cultural evolution, one of better awareness of our capabilities as citizens to organise and demand better of our leaders.
    • imtringued 3mo ago
      >The solution then seems to be holding people in power accountable, no? How do you hold people in power accountable if you get sued by them when you criticize them? That's the biggest reason why politicians want a full name / ID verification policy on the internet. It's so they can easily locate and sue their political enemies.
      • fyredge 3mo ago
        By fighting back in court. Better yet, by organising with others. I believe that it is in the interest of many to hold powerful people to account. Seek them out, share resources, organise a defense. It is not easy, and nothing good ever is. ID verification is pretty much a non-factor here. No one's listening to a politician who's real name is unknown. For all anyone knows, it could be a foreign actor / spy anyways.
  • yorwba 3mo ago
    On the contrary, I don't think the current relative lack of arbitrary police brutality depends on the reasonableness of the people in power at all, only on the reasonableness of individual police officers. The police don't suddenly get softer when there's a left-wing government in power and tougher when there's a right-wing government. That "merely criticizing" the state gets you into an adversarial relationship is, I think, also overblown. For example, insulting someone is a crime in Germany. This is usually not enforced on children's playgrounds, so many remain unaware of this until adulthood. Then they might insult someone who is aware of the law (e.g. a representative of the state) in public and get surprised by a lawsuit. Similarly, spray-painting slogans on someone's house without permission will get prosecuted as vandalism. But if you stick to publishing in ways that normal people publish pro-state opinions, you can publish your criticism in the same way and nobody will bat an eye. (Certainly, a large number of people are criticizing the state in exactly this way at any given time, without being worse off for it.)
    • wasabi991011 3mo ago
      > The police don't suddenly get softer when there's a left-wing government in power and tougher when there's a right-wing government. They absolutely can though, through hiring selection bias, training, firing, promotion criteria, bonuses, performance metrics and quotas, oversight enforcement or lack thereof, etc. It's not quick, but incentive structures can absolutely change an organizational culture.
• mothballed 3mo ago
  Unfortunately, reasonable men, perhaps virtually all reasonable men, can and will become more corrupted by expansive power. The fact that they were not corrupted when they had less leverage on the populace doesn't mean they will behave differently than other historical German (/human) apparats when they have a bit more of the intoxicating liquor. >r warrant was for a different address and they left. I am sorry but this is not something that I find "reasonable" or "positive impression" unless small children are the instigators or low stakes events are involved. If armed men are barging into sacred spaces they need to be able to triple, quadruple check they are performing what the warrant says and if not then nothing else they are doing shall be trusted either. Invading a home uninvited is a life and death matter and there is no room for policeman who make such glaring mistakes even if the natural untrained or undisciplined random person naturally might.
  • yorwba 3mo ago
    They didn't actually make any mistakes. The only way for them to quadruple-check was to knock on my totally featureless door and ask, which they did. There was never a threat of lethal violence, hardly a life and death matter.
    • mothballed 3mo ago
      >There was never a threat of lethal violence, hardly a life and death matter. Do you suppose the state charge you with a violence linked crime if you showed up to Chancellor of Germany's private home with a battering ram and holstered weapons and started "readying your battering ram" to barge in? I realize there is the additional element that it was authorized against a different home and "just a mistake" but that is immaterial to whether the execution of a warrant involves threat of lethal violence (that is for good reason, checked by a judge).
  • account42 3mo ago
    Yeah, this read like someone reviewing a mob organization with "4/5 always polite when they come to collect". I was initially convinced that it had to be sarcasm but since gp insists in keeping up the spiel in replies I am less sure now.
• osidjdjfjwjf 3mo ago
  > giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia. Are you seriously saying that with a straight face while (apparently) living in Germany of all places? May I suggest picking up a history book or two?
  • yorwba 3mo ago
    Believe me, German history education is very thorough in making sure people know that the Nazis weren't some kind of slippery slope situation where people didn't know what they were planning to do. The Nazis were open in their idea that Germany could have won WWI if it hadn't been for those damn lefties and their revolution. They were open about their desire to crush those lefties. They were open about their hatred for Jews. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf about his ideology in prison after his failed 1923 coup. When people voted for him in the 1932 election, they weren't somehow unaware of these. They voted for him because they knew and because they agreed.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      It was over a decade after the end of the war before the average German person realised the Nazis were the bad guys. Germany is also involving itself in another war right now where it thinks it is a good guy.
      • AlexeyBelov 3mo ago
        Which war?
• krater23 3mo ago
  Would you think the same thing if you happened not to be there, came home half an hour later to find your apartment ransacked with the door smashed in, and had to wait a few months for compensation for the repairs?
  • yorwba 3mo ago
    They only threatened to break down the door because I told them to wait a moment as I was in the kitchen. My neighbor, whom they were actually looking for, was apparently not at home and they left his door intact. I guess for non-urgent searches they would get a locksmith to open the door in a less destructive manner. But sure, if they had caused significant damage and I had to wait for compensation, I would get upset. At the claims processing bureaucracy, not the police for acting on the information they had available.
• dTal 3mo ago
  Serious question - looking around, do you really think "everything is going basically fine"?
  • yorwba 3mo ago
    Yes. I didn't vote for either of the parties in power, they implement many policies I disagree with, but this makes surprisingly little difference in practice.
• ezst 3mo ago
  I think I'm like you in the sense that I'm a law abiding citizen in what I consider a high trust society. That said, I'm not naive to the fact that "having nothing to hide hence nothing to fear" doesn't cut it: privacy eroding laws are a slippery slope eventually leading to finding yourself on the wrong side of what's deemed acceptable. That, and to the fact that law enforcement association with political extremism has only increased in recent years, as evidenced by the number of reports about bursting neo-nazi groups and such.