Now, I'm sure there are a few cases where cops maliciously killed people, maybe even out of racist motivations. But keep in mind that the US has about a million police officers, so a couple of dozen homicides a year by police officers would simply match the murder rate in the general population.
We are talking about unarmed Black people who have done nothing other than contempt of cop or "resisting arrest" when they weren't being arrested.
When a cop stops you, you need to comply or you risk getting shot; whether you're armed or unarmed, black or white, guilty or innocent is, and has always been, irrelevant. Furthermore, the rate at which innocent, unarmed people get stopped by race should match the proportions of criminal suspects, not the proportions of the population; that's because cops tend to stop people who resemble criminal suspects. I have no idea whether people "deserve" this, but it's the way it works.
Would I like to change the system? Of course. For many reasons, I'd like to replace public police protected by public sector unions with private security forces, with full legal liability and financial accountability.
The problems are endemic and wishing will not make them go away.
Well, you are absolutely right: these problems are "endemic"; that is, they are limited to particular locations and groups of people. They are not universal problems, they are not epidemic problems, and they are not growing problems.
We need citizen's police review boards with teeth everywhere that we have cops.
Why? It's the job of city government and/or elections to review police. The city where I live seems to be doing a good job. Why should my city have the expense and hassle of another federally mandated office just because a few yokels in the South can't get their act together?
Police Unions are helping the police murder, rape, and enslave us. It is difficult to imagine a solution to this problem that does not include action from the federal government.
Much as I think that public sector unions are a bad idea, the federal government isn't going to abolish them. There is nothing else useful they can do.
Really? Local problems fix themselves? Is that why we have the fourteenth amendment?
Slavery was a situation in which a state-level majority deprived a minority of their basic rights through the democratic process. That simply isn't the case in places like Ferguson.
I think it does take self-righteous privileged white liberals in DC to fix the problems in Ferguson. They're called congress.
We're a nation founded on principles of local government and subsidiarity. That's because we realized early on that people and their needs are different. Congress has no idea what the people of Ferguson or Detroit or Short Hills or wherever actually want or need. That's why Congress's ability to mess with these issues is limited by law. Congress might be able to step in if the people of Ferguson were deprived of their ability to govern themselves, or if a majority of Ferguson voters had attempted to deprive a minority of their civil rights. But none of that happened. Ferguson is majority black to begin with, and it got the government and police it ended up with through a legitimate vote among all the people. Congress has no business second guessing that. Personally, I think they picked a lousy city government, but that's just not my business.
This quote from TFA says it all: what happens on the Internet is of little relative value compared to what actual people do in the Real World, because there is little to no risk involved in anything you do on the Internet,and if you protest in the Real World?
Why should protests in the real world make any more difference? Whether a tiny number of people parade around in the streets or post stuff on the Internet is irrelevant for political or economic change. What matters is votes, laws, and dollars. Everything else is at best propaganda and advertising.
A big social issue in America today is abusive policing,
It's a "big social issue" in the sense that there is a lot of press coverage, not in the sense that it actually affects the daily lives of a lot of people. And the lives it actually affects are the lives of people who are generally simply apathetic about using the democratic process to improve their lives.
Instead, you should say that it is good, because those millions of people are finally aware of an issue that has long been ignored. On election day, perhaps they will have second thoughts about voting for the district attorney that is endorsed by the police union.
Policing is a local issue. It doesn't take millions of self-righteous privileged white liberals in Boston or DC to fix the problems in Ferguson, it's something the people of Ferguson need to do by participating in local elections and politics. Unfortunately, the kind of online activism you seem to favor actually reinforces the ignorance and belief of minority communities that it is "the system" or "racism" or something else outside their control that is causing their local governments to be dysfunctional.
You're confusing my statement about it being "better for everyone" with a moral or legal principle for resolving a dispute after some wrong has been committed. What I'm saying is that there is a set of contractual and legal obligations that is commonly used to set up travel because it is "better for everyone".
If you don't like that set of contractual and legal obligations, nobody is forcing you to travel according to them. You always have the option, for example, of buying a fully refundable ticket or buying travel insurance that covers such issues.
Without this rule, you get Kafkaesque situations where nobody's responsible for anything
Ultimately, the traveler is responsible with the risk associated with the trip. He decides whether he travels to the US and takes the risk of not getting admitted, knowing that the US can make such decisions arbitrarily and without any compensation. He also decides what kind of ticket to buy at what price and with what airline. Airlines offer fully refundable tickets, and they offer non-refundable tickets; there are also various forms of travel insurance that cover such eventualities.
If a passenger decides to buy a non-refundable ticket, the passenger assumes the risk. If the passenger doesn't like the risk and doesn't want to pay to insure against the risk, they shouldn't fly. There is nothing Kafkaesque about it.
Obviously my claim is not merely that I prefer it, but that it would be better that way (which is why I'd prefer it). But thanks for bringing up this irrelevant technicality, and not answering any of the other points I brought up.
I was merely being sarcastic. You write a whole bunch of vague bullshit, and when people take you literally, you complain that they are hung up on technicalities, and when they try to respond to what you probably mean, you complain that they are changing your words.
I find it quite ironic that you are trying to direct me to mises.org when I am already a libertarian.
I didn't point you to mises.org because it's a libertarian site, I point you to it because they happen to have an article that makes an economic point. You need to read and actually understand what that point is.
And, no, you are not actually a libertarian.
It is not that I think public goods come with no problems. It's that I think the privatizing those goods comes with even worse problems.
The only thing that statement tells me is that you don't understand what a "public good" is.
You said you think the government is good at fighting wars. I think I would disagree with that given our track record,
I didn't say that it "is good at", I said "it can do quite well". That is, it doesn't always do them well, but it has the potential to do them well. However, I think the US government has an excellent track record at fighting wars: we can mobilize resources and bomb people far better than anybody else. That doesn't mean that that power is used productively or for good purposes. Let me put it more bluntly: government is quite good at killing people.
however I think privatizing our military and foreign policy would be even worse.
The military and foreign policy shouldn't be privatized, they simply shouldn't exit.
So it is not enough to point out the failings of government management of X. You must also show that Y is a better alternative.
As a classical liberal (aka libertarian), the only notion of "better" that matters to me is the notion of "more freedom from coercion".
You obviously have a different notion of "better", which means you are not a libertarian. But even if government were the "better" alternative in the management of X according to your criteria of "better", libertarians would still reject it: it is incompatible with freedom to use government coercion to achieve "better" outcomes because government coercion is itself wrong. Luckily, reducing government coercion also tends to increase economic and social outcomes.
Then sure I am all for private internet access (i.e. private citizens accessing the internet from their private residences).
I'm sorry you are so unfamiliar with the terminology; your "i.e." is the wrong definition.
I am not sure why you keep failing to realize that I am not advocating free municipal broadband. Just like I am not advocating free water, electricity and gas.
I do realize that. I'm pointing out that I consider your premise that something should be done because it "aligns with the interests of the people" (where "the people" in your terminology refers to special interest groups like "broadband users") wrong.
See, once you subsume something into "government", the idea that you have a "self-sustaining service" doesn't work (because you simply can't account for costs and benefits anymore).
You absolutely can. Just don't give this service any public funding.
Not giving it "public funding" is insufficient; you also need to not regulate it differently from commercial competitors, not share resources, force it to pay for government services and pay taxes at the same rate as public providers, raise its own capital, and let it go out of business if it fails to make a profit.
I don;t doubt that privately owned roads would be operating based on profit motive. I just don't think this is a good thing when it comes to roads, or any other restricted market with no competition.
Of course it's not a good thing to have for-profit companies when there is no competition. But the reason there is no competition in the first place is government restriction on competition. The solution to that is not to create municipal services, it is to remove the regulations that prevent competition.
Nope. Sorry, but that is plain batshit wrong (spoiler: I am a European citizen of country A, member state of the EU, living in country B, also an EU member state).
No, it's not "batshit wrong". And, yeah, I'm also from Europe originally, so don't try to pull authority with your bullshit.
... whose function is not even close to that...
Of course it's not: Europe is just a few decades out the gate doing what the US did a couple of centuries ago, and Europe started off with a bunch of cultures and ideologies that had just murdered each other by the millions and hated each others guts. Of course, the EU isn't as closely integrated, of course, the European presidency doesn't have a lot of power yet, and of course, lawmaking happens much more at the state level. The EU hasn't had its 14th Amendment yet, nor its Civil War over states rights. The EU is a young, immature, and fragile political construct populated by a politically naive and inexperienced citizenship.
But the construct of the EU is very similar to the construct of the US: a region in which people and goods can move freely and have a common legal framework. That means that when you compare the US with Europe, you need to compare the US with the EU as a whole, not with individual member states.
A large number of Blacks didn't get killed by cops today. That's not proof the justice system is colorblind.
The rate at which cops kill blacks is commensurate with the rate at which blacks commit violent felonies relative to the population at large. (If anything, if you look at the number, cops have a slight racial bias against shooting blacks.)
No, it's not a "straw man argument"; it's not an "argument at all". It's a restatement of your reasoning.
I'm afraid your attempt to claim that no racism exists because there exist people who are not harassed is similarly poor logic.
Nowhere did I say that "no racism exists". In fact, I said explicitly: "clearly there is some racism in the US").
Even a casual review, however, shows many well-done tests and scholarly studies demonstrating the racism and religious profiling by TSA personnel
There are studies that show that Muslims are treated differently. Treating people differently because of their race or religion is not "racism" if the race or religion is actually relevant to what you are looking for.
How about a commitment by the technology-pushers to obey the law to start with?
As a technology pusher, I'm perfectly committed to obeying the law. However, that still means I can push technology that subverts the intent of a law and demonstrates how stupid it is.
particularly when it comes to the structure of laws and regulations that have been put in place to protect the general population from damage and exploitation
Those are usually the kinds of laws that one has to observe to the letter, but that ought to be subverted for the good of the people.
Unfortunately, a lot of legislation nominally intended to "help the people" or "ensure civil rights" has other consequences, sometimes intended, sometimes not. Some of those consequences are part of the original drafting, others get added at the last minute, often subverting the stated intent of the legislation. It often only takes adding one sentence or changing a couple of words to completely derail or reverse legislation.
Passing new legislation for any purpose, however noble, is like a high wire act without a safety net: maybe you'll succeed without falling, but you really have to ask yourself whether it's worth the risk.
Why? The airline could have allowed them to board, fly to the US, be denied entry in the US. At that point, the family would have had to buy return tickets for themselves, probably at the highest rate. Not letting them board if they will be denied entry is the best solution for everybody.
True enough, but amazingly, the US government doesn't always jump because some special interest group wants something.
Now, I'm not defending DHS here; I think they are an awful agency and illustrate how bad government-run programs are. It is amazing to me that people want nationalized health care, social security, and other services like that from a government that produces DHS.
However, given that border security is actually a delegated power of the federal government, and given that anti-terrorism is something the American people actually want, DHS is doing what it is supposed to do within the limitations of how well any big government agency can function.
Well, my point was that I was counting countries [wikipedia.org]. Country. You know, that thing with a common head of state, often federal laws and institutions... well.. a COUNTRY! a friggin run of the mill independant, soverign state.
The EU has a common head of state, often federal laws and institutions.and has started to integrate its military. So, yes, the EU is very much like the US federal government, just a little late to the starting block (because Europeans spent a couple of centuries longer under monarchies and fascism).
There is nothing "obviously" false about this. Racism doesn't have to be applied 100% for it to be a very real force in American culture
Your reasoning is apparently that if something bad happens to a Muslim or African American, without any other evidence, it must be due to racism. Your reasoning is faulty both when it comes to Muslims and when it comes to African Americans.
There is no reason to believe that racism caused this family's denial of entrance, just like there is no reason to believe that racism causes most of the negative outcomes or statistical differences between African American and white populations in the US (clearly there is some racism in the US, but no more than in other countries).
Why don't you read the entire quote and actually understand it?
Senior politicians have been drawn into the case, warning that a growing number of British Muslims are being barred from the US without being told the reason for their exclusion.
So, first, the "growing number of Muslims" isn't a fact, it's a belief of senior politicians.
Second, to the degree that it's true, what's unexpected about it? Since the US faces Islamic terrorism and such terrorist networks are mostly composed of Muslims, you would expect a "growing number of British Muslims" to be barred from entry into the US. That's not because they are Muslim, it's because they are linked to terrorist organizations.
A British Muslim family heading for Disneyland was barred from boarding a flight to Los Angeles by US authorities at London’s Gatwick airport amid concerns of an American overreaction to the perceived terrorist threat. US Department of Homeland Security officials provided no explanation for why the country refused to allow the family of 11 to board the planeeven though they had been granted travel authorization online ahead of their planned 15 December flight. Senior politicians have been drawn into the case, warning that a growing number of British Muslims are being barred from the US without being told the reason for their exclusion.
The implication of the article is that somehow US authorities are discriminating against this family because of their faith. Obviously, that's false, since there are large numbers of Muslims traveling to the US every day.
The actual reason may be anything from insufficient funds to cover a family of 11 to documented terrorist connections. Would it be better for US authorities to provide reasons and let people know earlier? Of course. Is there any kind of obligation to do so? No.
Note that the UK bans people from entry for no other reason than that they voice unpopular political views, so the UK government is hardly in a position to criticize other nations over arbitrary exclusions.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't you go through the database and actually pick out the kinds of cases you mean?
http://www.theguardian.com/us-...
Now, I'm sure there are a few cases where cops maliciously killed people, maybe even out of racist motivations. But keep in mind that the US has about a million police officers, so a couple of dozen homicides a year by police officers would simply match the murder rate in the general population.
When a cop stops you, you need to comply or you risk getting shot; whether you're armed or unarmed, black or white, guilty or innocent is, and has always been, irrelevant. Furthermore, the rate at which innocent, unarmed people get stopped by race should match the proportions of criminal suspects, not the proportions of the population; that's because cops tend to stop people who resemble criminal suspects. I have no idea whether people "deserve" this, but it's the way it works.
Would I like to change the system? Of course. For many reasons, I'd like to replace public police protected by public sector unions with private security forces, with full legal liability and financial accountability.
You don't know what you're talking about.
So why are you pushing for an unfair and unjust society?
Well, you are absolutely right: these problems are "endemic"; that is, they are limited to particular locations and groups of people. They are not universal problems, they are not epidemic problems, and they are not growing problems.
Why? It's the job of city government and/or elections to review police. The city where I live seems to be doing a good job. Why should my city have the expense and hassle of another federally mandated office just because a few yokels in the South can't get their act together?
Much as I think that public sector unions are a bad idea, the federal government isn't going to abolish them. There is nothing else useful they can do.
Slavery was a situation in which a state-level majority deprived a minority of their basic rights through the democratic process. That simply isn't the case in places like Ferguson.
We're a nation founded on principles of local government and subsidiarity. That's because we realized early on that people and their needs are different. Congress has no idea what the people of Ferguson or Detroit or Short Hills or wherever actually want or need. That's why Congress's ability to mess with these issues is limited by law. Congress might be able to step in if the people of Ferguson were deprived of their ability to govern themselves, or if a majority of Ferguson voters had attempted to deprive a minority of their civil rights. But none of that happened. Ferguson is majority black to begin with, and it got the government and police it ended up with through a legitimate vote among all the people. Congress has no business second guessing that. Personally, I think they picked a lousy city government, but that's just not my business.
Why should protests in the real world make any more difference? Whether a tiny number of people parade around in the streets or post stuff on the Internet is irrelevant for political or economic change. What matters is votes, laws, and dollars. Everything else is at best propaganda and advertising.
Better apathy than good intentions; the road to hell is paved with the latter.
It's a "big social issue" in the sense that there is a lot of press coverage, not in the sense that it actually affects the daily lives of a lot of people. And the lives it actually affects are the lives of people who are generally simply apathetic about using the democratic process to improve their lives.
Policing is a local issue. It doesn't take millions of self-righteous privileged white liberals in Boston or DC to fix the problems in Ferguson, it's something the people of Ferguson need to do by participating in local elections and politics. Unfortunately, the kind of online activism you seem to favor actually reinforces the ignorance and belief of minority communities that it is "the system" or "racism" or something else outside their control that is causing their local governments to be dysfunctional.
You're confusing my statement about it being "better for everyone" with a moral or legal principle for resolving a dispute after some wrong has been committed. What I'm saying is that there is a set of contractual and legal obligations that is commonly used to set up travel because it is "better for everyone".
If you don't like that set of contractual and legal obligations, nobody is forcing you to travel according to them. You always have the option, for example, of buying a fully refundable ticket or buying travel insurance that covers such issues.
Ultimately, the traveler is responsible with the risk associated with the trip. He decides whether he travels to the US and takes the risk of not getting admitted, knowing that the US can make such decisions arbitrarily and without any compensation. He also decides what kind of ticket to buy at what price and with what airline. Airlines offer fully refundable tickets, and they offer non-refundable tickets; there are also various forms of travel insurance that cover such eventualities.
If a passenger decides to buy a non-refundable ticket, the passenger assumes the risk. If the passenger doesn't like the risk and doesn't want to pay to insure against the risk, they shouldn't fly. There is nothing Kafkaesque about it.
I was merely being sarcastic. You write a whole bunch of vague bullshit, and when people take you literally, you complain that they are hung up on technicalities, and when they try to respond to what you probably mean, you complain that they are changing your words.
I didn't point you to mises.org because it's a libertarian site, I point you to it because they happen to have an article that makes an economic point. You need to read and actually understand what that point is.
And, no, you are not actually a libertarian.
The only thing that statement tells me is that you don't understand what a "public good" is.
I didn't say that it "is good at", I said "it can do quite well". That is, it doesn't always do them well, but it has the potential to do them well. However, I think the US government has an excellent track record at fighting wars: we can mobilize resources and bomb people far better than anybody else. That doesn't mean that that power is used productively or for good purposes. Let me put it more bluntly: government is quite good at killing people.
The military and foreign policy shouldn't be privatized, they simply shouldn't exit.
As a classical liberal (aka libertarian), the only notion of "better" that matters to me is the notion of "more freedom from coercion".
You obviously have a different notion of "better", which means you are not a libertarian. But even if government were the "better" alternative in the management of X according to your criteria of "better", libertarians would still reject it: it is incompatible with freedom to use government coercion to achieve "better" outcomes because government coercion is itself wrong. Luckily, reducing government coercion also tends to increase economic and social outcomes.
Yes. I didn't want to go into all that detail, hence I simply said "stuck with".
I'm sorry you are so unfamiliar with the terminology; your "i.e." is the wrong definition.
I do realize that. I'm pointing out that I consider your premise that something should be done because it "aligns with the interests of the people" (where "the people" in your terminology refers to special interest groups like "broadband users") wrong.
Not giving it "public funding" is insufficient; you also need to not regulate it differently from commercial competitors, not share resources, force it to pay for government services and pay taxes at the same rate as public providers, raise its own capital, and let it go out of business if it fails to make a profit.
Of course it's not a good thing to have for-profit companies when there is no competition. But the reason there is no competition in the first place is government restriction on competition. The solution to that is not to create municipal services, it is to remove the regulations that prevent competition.
No, it's not "batshit wrong". And, yeah, I'm also from Europe originally, so don't try to pull authority with your bullshit.
Of course it's not: Europe is just a few decades out the gate doing what the US did a couple of centuries ago, and Europe started off with a bunch of cultures and ideologies that had just murdered each other by the millions and hated each others guts. Of course, the EU isn't as closely integrated, of course, the European presidency doesn't have a lot of power yet, and of course, lawmaking happens much more at the state level. The EU hasn't had its 14th Amendment yet, nor its Civil War over states rights. The EU is a young, immature, and fragile political construct populated by a politically naive and inexperienced citizenship.
But the construct of the EU is very similar to the construct of the US: a region in which people and goods can move freely and have a common legal framework. That means that when you compare the US with Europe, you need to compare the US with the EU as a whole, not with individual member states.
The rate at which cops kill blacks is commensurate with the rate at which blacks commit violent felonies relative to the population at large. (If anything, if you look at the number, cops have a slight racial bias against shooting blacks.)
No, it's not a "straw man argument"; it's not an "argument at all". It's a restatement of your reasoning.
Nowhere did I say that "no racism exists". In fact, I said explicitly: "clearly there is some racism in the US").
There are studies that show that Muslims are treated differently. Treating people differently because of their race or religion is not "racism" if the race or religion is actually relevant to what you are looking for.
As a technology pusher, I'm perfectly committed to obeying the law. However, that still means I can push technology that subverts the intent of a law and demonstrates how stupid it is.
Those are usually the kinds of laws that one has to observe to the letter, but that ought to be subverted for the good of the people.
Tough shit; those countries will have to come around to the idea that they cannot continue to oppress their citizens.
Unfortunately, a lot of legislation nominally intended to "help the people" or "ensure civil rights" has other consequences, sometimes intended, sometimes not. Some of those consequences are part of the original drafting, others get added at the last minute, often subverting the stated intent of the legislation. It often only takes adding one sentence or changing a couple of words to completely derail or reverse legislation.
Passing new legislation for any purpose, however noble, is like a high wire act without a safety net: maybe you'll succeed without falling, but you really have to ask yourself whether it's worth the risk.
Why? The airline could have allowed them to board, fly to the US, be denied entry in the US. At that point, the family would have had to buy return tickets for themselves, probably at the highest rate. Not letting them board if they will be denied entry is the best solution for everybody.
True enough, but amazingly, the US government doesn't always jump because some special interest group wants something.
Now, I'm not defending DHS here; I think they are an awful agency and illustrate how bad government-run programs are. It is amazing to me that people want nationalized health care, social security, and other services like that from a government that produces DHS.
However, given that border security is actually a delegated power of the federal government, and given that anti-terrorism is something the American people actually want, DHS is doing what it is supposed to do within the limitations of how well any big government agency can function.
That family hasn't been "banned", they have been "denied entry". Most of them might well be able to visit individually, for example.
The EU has a common head of state, often federal laws and institutions.and has started to integrate its military. So, yes, the EU is very much like the US federal government, just a little late to the starting block (because Europeans spent a couple of centuries longer under monarchies and fascism).
Your reasoning is apparently that if something bad happens to a Muslim or African American, without any other evidence, it must be due to racism. Your reasoning is faulty both when it comes to Muslims and when it comes to African Americans.
There is no reason to believe that racism caused this family's denial of entrance, just like there is no reason to believe that racism causes most of the negative outcomes or statistical differences between African American and white populations in the US (clearly there is some racism in the US, but no more than in other countries).
Why don't you read the entire quote and actually understand it?
So, first, the "growing number of Muslims" isn't a fact, it's a belief of senior politicians.
Second, to the degree that it's true, what's unexpected about it? Since the US faces Islamic terrorism and such terrorist networks are mostly composed of Muslims, you would expect a "growing number of British Muslims" to be barred from entry into the US. That's not because they are Muslim, it's because they are linked to terrorist organizations.
I don't think most Americans care.
You'd be amazed at how many Americans don't travel to Europe either because it's too much hassle.
The implication of the article is that somehow US authorities are discriminating against this family because of their faith. Obviously, that's false, since there are large numbers of Muslims traveling to the US every day.
The actual reason may be anything from insufficient funds to cover a family of 11 to documented terrorist connections. Would it be better for US authorities to provide reasons and let people know earlier? Of course. Is there any kind of obligation to do so? No.
Note that the UK bans people from entry for no other reason than that they voice unpopular political views, so the UK government is hardly in a position to criticize other nations over arbitrary exclusions.