Comment by morganvachon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morganvachon | Hacker News Reader

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> A large contributing factor is the military industrial complex spewing out death tech at an absurd rate, and with nobody to blow up with it all it just goes to police forces at auction.

Sometimes not even sold, but given. There are government programs where police departments can ask for used military gear and get it at no cost (i.e. no impact to their budget). This makes the departments especially eager to acquire as much "death tech" as they can.

> So you end up with towns of a thousand having swat teams and tanks and you wonder why the culture shifts from protecting and serving to war, death, and extortion.

This makes me very sad. I was born in the 70s so I grew up during the coldest part of the cold war. We were taught in school that (sorry to Godwin) Nazi Germany was pure evil, Stalinist Russia was pure evil, Italy under Mussolini was pure evil, China under Mao was pure evil, and so on. Yet here we are becoming just as militarized on a local level as those regimes, giving our police forces nearly carte blanche to oppress the citizens at will. It's disgusting and disturbing, and I say that as a former law enforcement employee of 14 years.

While we should be on guard for police abuses let's not pretend it is anywhere near Mao or Stalin.

I said "we are becoming". I didn't say we are there, but it's a disturbing trend. Take it from someone who worked on the inside, it's only getting worse.

I went through school in the 70s and 80s, and also remember learning about the clear dividing lines of inalienable human rights spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution that made us different from the Soviet Union.

Maybe the difference was never as black and white as it seemed to me at the time, but I still believe we have been drifting away from the protection of basic rights I was once taught were so important to who we are as a people.

If you're white.

It's not "police abuse" anymore, it's police murdering people in broad daylight, for no reason whatsoever (e.g. see that video of a homeless person being shot). And around the whole country, military-grade equipment is widely deployed, to be used against civilian situation.

That scares the shit out of me, and I don't even live in the US. Maybe your government is nowhere near Mao or Stalin, but all the required pieces of oppression are being rapidly put into place, so be very hopeful that two elections and a terror attack from now someone won't decide to actually use those tools.

Some European's cartoon vision of the US has no relevance to the likelihood of America's risk of being subjected to Mao or Stalin like oppression. It is just laughable.

Well, keep in mind that we the Europeans had a few oppressors in the last hundred years. We know how it looks.

To be fair, unless you're over 60, you probably don't know how it looks, you only know what you've been told, or what you've led yourself to believe.

Fair enough; what I know is from what we learn in school, from discussions with people, from my parents and grandparents, and of course in part from media.

You should go and read some history books, assuming you're able to read and comprehend them.

The DDR aka East Germany ended in the 90s, and the Franco regime in Spain ended 1975 with Francos death.

It is debatable if one should also count the Yugoslavian/Serbian government which existed until the mid-90s as oppressive - I certainly do, Miloševic rot in pieces.

Oh, I almost forgot the rest of the Soviet block... so you basically have oppressive regimes as low as 20-30 years ago, leaving a LOT of people with first hand experience.

> assuming you're able to read and comprehend them

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Well, yes.

But typically, the sort of people who blithely compare the US to a police state do so by invoking the Nazis. I wasn't going to credit such arguments with that much subtlety or self-awareness, since they seem to come from a sense of prejudice and knowledge of pop culture rather than history. Although you're right - there are a number of recent police states and dictatorships which the US does not resemble.

> but all the required pieces of oppression are being rapidly put into place

This was the point I was trying to make. No, we aren't there yet, but we're on the slope and it's getting more slippery every day.

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