Some might say that your description could basically be used as the dictionary entry for "police." It's been suggested that they're the best-armed gang on the streets, if not the best-disciplined.
They're certainly beyond the reach of the law, at least by the standards the rest of us are held to.
Overall, I think the police catch a lot of heat and resentment for the actions of their political bosses. Like corporations and unions, a community usually gets the police force it deserves. Unfortunately, that's no consolation to the individual citizens who cross paths with them.
A good start on repairing relations with the police would involve holding them to higher standards of behavior than the rest of us are expected to exhibit, instead of lower ones. I think most good cops would agree with that basic sentiment, since they're the ones who behave as if it were already the case.
Ultimately, though, when the government decides to launch an impossible war on drugs, terror, pornography, or some other abstract noun, the police will have to do the inevitable dirty work, and they will have to take much of the blame for the consequences. The real problem here isn't the FBI agents running the servers, but the administrative and legislative bosses they answer to.
I dunno. It sounds like on the one hand, you're blaming police officers and departments for problems which have origin in corruption at a pay grade well above theirs, and on the other, you're defining (or would define, perhaps) any attempt by police forces to influence, rather than merely execute, policy, as stigmatic of a police state. Seems like a bit of a Catch-22 to me.
It is a Catch-22, definitely. At some point you get into the whole "Nuremberg defense" thing.
There is little practical difference between the Black Marias described by Solzhenitsyn and what happened to Freddie Gray in the back of a van in Baltimore. But how can we fix that sort of thing at an institutional level, when supervisors, prosecutors, judges, and juries insist on going easy on the actual perpetrators? That's the sort of question I'm compelled to ask when the FBI comes around, hat in hand, to ask for even more surveillance and enforcement powers.
> There is little practical difference between the Black Marias described by Solzhenitsyn and what happened to Freddie Gray in the back of a van in Baltimore.
You horrify me, sir. You truly do.
We agree, I think - I hope - that our current system of rule staggers under an enormous burden of corruption, which if not addressed will continue to expand until it bears us all under. And we agree, I think - I hope - that this is something which would better be prevented than otherwise.
But to equate what happened to one man, himself and his fate far from usual in myriad ways, with what happened as a matter of official policy under a regime that murdered thirty millions of its subjects simply because they were inconvenient? Where is the sense, or the value, in this? You have succeeded in horrifying someone who has otherwise considerable sympathy for the point you sought to make, although not so much the lack of nuance with which you did so. What effect do you imagine yourself likely to have on someone who does not start out with such sympathy?
What effect do you imagine yourself likely to have on someone who does not start out with such sympathy?
I can only recount the emergence of my own point of view. It's 1990-something, and I'm killing a Saturday afternoon in a used-book store in Austin, somewhere near the UT campus. Wow, lots of dust on this one. I'll bet nobody's touched it for 20 years. I've heard of this Solzhenitsyn guy, wonder what it's about? Didn't he win a Nobel? I guess for $1 it's worth a shot.
And then, a few months later when I got around to reading it: Wow, I used to think that the Russians were like the Nazis or something, a bunch of inhuman demons, maybe a barbarian race that evolved from a worse sort of ape than the rest of us. But they aren't. They really aren't. They're just like us. They are us. And the stuff in this book didn't really happen because of differences in politics or religion or economics or communism versus capitalism or whatever. It happened because the Russian people allowed their political system to dominate their judicial system. The courts were their last line of defense, and when they fell, the rest was inevitable.
The best time to stop the Black Marias would have been before the first one rolled out. The next best time was just after the first one rolled out. Either way, it didn't happen, and now I see the same thing happening here in the US that led to the events described in the Gulag Archipelago: the political subversion of justice.
It seems to start with the elevation of the cult of law enforcement as a privileged class, or at least that's something that tends to happen in the early stages of metastasis (to use Solzhenitsyn's metaphor.) In Russia, the rationale was the struggle against counterrevolutionary forces and the bourgeoisie. In the US, it's the War on Terror, Drugs, and Kiddie Porn. I don't see much difference.
So, yeah, horror is an appropriate expression when you think you can see a map like this starting to unfold.
I fear we've badly misgathered one another, and I regret to say I don't really see any purpose my further involvement might serve.
I will say this: perhaps the most striking feature I observe in your analysis is that everything in it is very simple. I wish I had more often observed reality to be so.
Somalia is a failed state run by divisional chieftains and warlords with military weaponry. In other words, it's all police.
That aside, how surreal is it to argue in favor of the application of equal justice for all under the rule of law, only to have "herp, derp, why don't you move to Somalia?" thrown in your face as a counterargument?
I suggested it because it's equally fallacious of you to equate police with "warlords with military weaponry". You can use all the fancy nostalgic buzzwords you want, but ultimately if the law has no bite, nobody will honor it. That bite is called enforcement and it's done by police. Get over it.
> I suggested it because it's equally fallacious of you to equate police with "warlords with military weaponry".
I agree. Do you think perhaps it might be of some value to argue this point in a way that's not trivial to dismiss for valid reasons? I think perhaps it might be of some value. Feel free to continue to caricature yourself for the benefit of unsympathetic interlocutors if it pleases you to do so, but please also consider the possibility that you might argue more effectively by doing otherwise.
They're certainly beyond the reach of the law, at least by the standards the rest of us are held to.