Comment on [Video] Cops not sure whether to arrest man with "Plasticine Action" shirt for supporting terrorism
FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world 15 hours agoCounter-nitpick accepted 😄
If you’re in the US, yes, you’re famed for all the policing issues you mentioned. I can only go off of conversations with my friends dotted around the EU but the perception we have is that police here are different because of circumstances rather than innate qualities. They’re generally not armed, they’re slightly better educated and at least on paper, there are institutions providing oversight.
But the same problems exist here to one degree or another, especially racism. But also excessive force, using their position as an officer to protect themselves from accountability around issues including domestic violence … and while lie detectors are rarely used they are starting to use AI at border control to detect if people might be lying: peopleofcolorintech.com/…/ai-lie-detectors-at-bor…
So I don’t know how we really compare. I see some crazy videos from the USA of people’s interactions with police. It seems like another world completely compared to here in Ireland. And ICE seem like domestic terrorists rather than law enforcement.
But we also have institutional corruption so bad that the force tried to frame a whistleblower (Maurice McCabe) for child abuse. The most senior people were replaced with someone who wasn’t Irish (Drew Harris), essentially given the job of draining the swamp / reforming the institution.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
I think I generally agree with everything you’ve said, yes I am from/in the US, I also have had many EU internet friends over the years… yeah, policing problems exist everywhere, but they’re a lot worse here tham the EU generally.
We have the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, of any large, developed country.
We imprison more of our population than commonly referenced authoritarian states like Russia and China.
We have more total prisoners than Stalin had in labor camp gulags at the height of the gulag system, we have more people incarcerated than China does, and their population is roughly 4x larger than ours.
We treat way, way too many problems as crimes to be jailed or imprisoned for, not social problems to be solved at the root cause, and we have a neat little carve out in our Constitution that explicitly allows slavery, forced labor, for imprisoned people… we have a massive industry of private, for profit prisons, that exploits this slave labor.
And all those figures and facts were true for years, decades, long before Trump and MAGA just went full fascist, and decided to bring back WW2 style internment camps, but for undocumented migrants, and the homeless.
We’ve already got disease outbreaks running through these concentration camps, which are largely being blacked out of the media, I will be entirely unsurprised if we just progress as the Nazis did to ‘work till you die’ camps and outright death camps, in just a few years time.
Shit’s really bad over here.
FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
I didn’t realise how high the prison population numbers are. I first became aware of the issue when System of a Down released “Prison song”.
Those numbers you shared are really abhorrent, and explains why my lawyer acquaintance finds the prison system there shocking (he visited the US a few times). He absolutely would not want to see something “so inhumane” here.
I wonder how to interpret the 82% non-conviction in the context of over-conviction.
We have people in prison that are as much victims of poverty and undiagnosed problems like ADHD / autism. So if we have people imprisoned who would be better served (including society) elsewhere, I can imagine it’s pretty bad there in the U.S. Ifs a genuine tragedy, but an injustice against human rights too.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
System of a Down?
Here’s my attempt at an inverse:
Rammstein: Amerika (it’s wunderbar!)
Yeah, I’m sick of us too.
We are a third world country in a gucci belt, we are basically a failed state at this point.
Oh hey! David Bowie: I’m afraid of Americans.
Me to Dave, me too. RIP.
FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I know (and like) the David Bowie one partly for that line. Thanks for the Rammstein recommendation, I hadn’t heard it. It feels apt for Europe, which seems increasingly Americanised.
When I was growing up there was a song called “In American” by British band Red Box. But looking back, I think it’s hypocritical to criticise America if we don’t also acknowledge our own comparable problems here. We’re not dealing with the same scale of predators you have there because - at least in Ireland - there was less for the ambitious and power-craving individuals to aspire to. Those people usually left for America for that reason, where they could be their unbridled, exploitative selves and make more money than they ever would have here.
So I don’t see Americans as the problem, but the systems and the difficulty in changing them. Many problematic people have simply been exposed to unimaginable amounts of disinformation and cults. It’s a difficult problem but if anyone can overcome it I think you can.
There are more decent people in the USA than the news cycle and online grift-fluencers make it seem.
I think we’re all the same. I despair too, but each population grows up in its own Petri dish. Depending on what attention your resources have attracted and how corrupt the news cycle is, different traits will be evoked in society. So while it’s bad, and seemingly getting worse, I have a bit more hope in people wherever they’re from.
I feel for you. I’m not even based in the USA and I find it impossible to avoid US news of the latest political vulgarity. So I follow the good people who lift my heart - whether that’s Project Pink!, Mumdani in NY or anybody who gives me hope. We can’t let the despair get us, because that’s the real war that’s going on here. Once we let despair reign inside us, they’ve won. Keep the faith!