This is a complete sidetrack to the OP, but I think I know how this story ends. Eventually one of the competing power centers becomes more powerful than the others, declares themselves king, and the other power centers have to pay fealty to him. You just invented feudalism.
Give it a few hundred years of brutal civil strife it may turn into absolute monarchy, then if you’re really lucky, constitutional monarchy.
Except it is not murder.
Look, sure cops have been known to misjudge a situation and shoot someone who didnt deserve it.
Do you think that do it with malice aforethought? Premeditation? What is their motive?
Mostly they are 100% justified. Once in a great while, they make a mistake. Once in a even greater while that mistake is so egregious they are convicted of a crime.
In many states, “abandoned and malignant heart” applies to second degree murder. It is still a charge of murder but due to the recklessness, rather than purposeful or knowing intent or express malice.
As an example that did not lead to death, but to demonstrate an example of recklessness, consider this officer, brandishing a weapon and pointing at this motorcycle rider.
The officer was completely out of line brandishing his firearm, had he fired it *would* have been murder.There is nothing quite so premeditated as organized crime, except perhaps for government.
Everything the government police do is premeditated and laced with malice aforethought. At a distance, the foundations of the premeditation and malice aforethought originate in the voters. They want to control the non-violent behavior of the society at-large. They vote for representatives who create laws to carry out the voters’ collective desires. These laws commission police departments who have quite a bit of discretion. They institute policies of haranguing, harassing, intimidating, tricking, and violently confronting thousands upon thousands of individuals for mostly non-violent and non-tortious offenses.
Statists would like for this argument to begin at the confrontation between individual and police officer. This is similar to the case of the murder of Trayvon Martin, where he was stalked by an armed gunman until it was not possible for him to resist a confrontation. At which point he got the best of the gunman and the gunman had no choice but to fire. Ok so why don’t we talk about why the confrontation occurred to begin with?
Let’s take an example where police may have some legitimate cause, traffic stops. After all, most people would agree that the state owns the roadways, therefore police are exercising legitimate property rights(I do not agree but that is another argument). Someone harmlessly exceeds the speed limit? Let’s pull over the car to the side of a freeway and bark orders while aiming a gun at the person. This is a premeditated policy of initiating a violent encounter with a nonviolent person. If the person is killed by police, it should be considered a felony murder. If anyone else approached a situation in this manner, murder charges would be in order.
Let’s not forget that police departments and legislatures have made premeditated robbery a lawful policy. They dispatch armed gunmen to rob unsuspecting individuals of many assets. The ownership of these assets is not in dispute until the police confiscate them. Resisting such robbery will be met with death or imprisonment.
So no, but nice try. I will not limit my criticism of government police to the biomechanics of their encounters and whether they reacted wrongly in a split second. I will also not try to argue about the racism of officers and whether that is what ultimately made him pull the trigger . Lovers of the state prefer to argue endlessly over these less important causations of police murder because it keeps the issue a wedge issue.
Police serve legitimate purposes, investigating violent crimes and serving warrants. Sadly, they sometimes do not use appropriate force when serving the warrants.
Fortunately, the vast majority of deadly police encounters are avoidable and would be entirely unnecessary in a private property regime. Unfortunately, this regime is not implemented in many government dominated areas like the most violent cities in the US.
Care to make up your mind?
If these are your sincere beliefs, then I can’t help you and further debate is useless.
The thing is, Will isn’t 100% wrong in his critique of government. A government is just an organized gang of people whose superior power let’s them order you around.
This has been the case all through human history since the neolithic era. It doesn’t matter what you call these people, chiefs, elders, knights, princes, priests, capos, warlords, or senators, it’s all variations on the same theme. It sucks, and it exists because two guys can kick the crap out of one guy, and four guys can kick the crap out of two guys, and eight guys can kick the crap out of four guys, and so on.
Oppression of the weak requires organization by the strong. But how do the strong organize themselves? Even among criminal gangs dedicated to theft and murder there are internal rules, because without those rules you don’t have organized crime, you just have a bunch of individual criminals.
The boss has to keep his soldiers happy, even when the soldiers are out robbing and brutalizing the peasants. Thenot someone figures out how to organize the bosses, and he’s what we call a chief. Organize the chiefs, and you’re a king.
Modern liberal democracy is just a way of cutting in the peasants and putting them to work on a more rational basis, via the same sort of deals that only applied to the soldiers and aristocracy in simpler systems.
Abolishing or radically scaling back so called “government” won’t solve anything, because all it does is substitute a new system of oppression for the old one. Private cops? Dude, cops and soldiers work for the people who pay their salary, same as always since the neolithic. If you think cops controlled by the local bosses are going to be different from the cops controlled by the local bosses, just because in one case the bosses are labeled “government” but in another case are labeled “private security” or “mob enforcer” then you’re insane.
Yup. Like most alternate social systems from Marxian Communism to Randian Libertarianism, WillFarnaby’s ideas (as best I can glean them) work great if applied to creatures other than humans.
As a Progresive I believe we can have governments that better serve all the people. We’re falling far short of what we can do with this generation of people. And I believe we can, incrementally, improve the society and the people at large who grow up within that improved environment. As with compound interest, the future in a couple hundred years can be almost unimaginably richer and more just if only we can gather the will to bother to try.
But just like we’re not going to genetically engineer humans to sprout wings and fly by flapping, we’re not going to create private bosses who are anything other than warlords. Unless held in check by some bigger warlord. Putting the rank and file at least nominally in charge was a watershed change from all that came before. It needs further expansion, not a retreat to the Feudal Ages.
Absolutely true. And there are lots of very specific complaints about the U.S. that are wholly valid. We do put way too many people in prison, and we have way too many lawsuits. We have both too many petty regulations…and, at the same time, a huge problem with under-regulated corporations.
(Ppollution and corruption high on the list. Wells Fargo created millions of fraudulent customer accounts. Yeesh! That was a time when we needed more government, not less!)
There is.
Send me your banking details, credit card information, and Social Security number, and I can get it for you.
Regards,
Shodan
Under a private property regime George Zimmerman gets a gold star and a raise by the local private property strongman. Some excellent protection of private property by a private citizen against non-property owning ner-do-well.
Seeing as we’ve long since left the domain of the OP. My two-cents on the general argument that “government shouldn’t have the monopoly on the use of force”:
A - The idea that private use of force (via the right to bear arms) will restrict government use of force is blatantly bullshit. The US might not be a some kind of libertarian “utopia” but US citizens clearly have far more access to the use force (via the 2nd amendment) and the result is government law enforcement thatis orders of magnitude more likely to kill their citizens (e.g. police in one town in the US with the same population as Iceland killed 3x more people in 5 months than the police in Iceland did in 71 years). There is more than one reason for this, but clearly a big part of it is the US police expect to deal with an armed populace, and act accordingly. As a result they kill far, far more people (and are killed more often)
B- All these extreme anti-government positions inevitably boil down to having some kind of local government (though they may not like calling it that). The idea that this government would have less of the evils of the big bad federal government is laughable. In every way small local government is more likely to be corrupt, violent, unaccountable, etc. than big government. If you take away the oversight of local government (as there is no big bad country-wide to government to oversee them) that only gets way, way worse. Historically one of the main reason for centralized government was so citizens could appeal to the central government against oppression by the local government.
I don’t think you’ve accurately described ‘most people’. The logic of policing the streets is not “the government is protecting its property rights”. Rather, the police are there to enforce public safety and order.
I’m not sure how this comment relates to your overall point, but your theory of why police patrol the streets strikes me as very odd.
This is right down my street, since I’m the premier expert on American law, and where its legitimacy fails.
To begin with, SC’s are mutually in error with the US government; since both err in their legal arguments. The US government claims to derive its authority from the Constitution and international law, while SC’s likewise claim that the US government holds no authority over them.
Both claims are false, since the supreme national authority in each state is the will of its respective People, as noted in the Constitution-- not as forming a single nation-state whose final authority rests with a republican government (since this would be not a democracy, but an oligarchy).
So only the CSA had the correct legal argument: i.e. that each state is a separate nation-state unto itself, but supremely ruled by its respective People (i.e. its citizen-voters). After all, that’s how we got the Constitution in the first place; and they didn’t alter that status.
So while SC’s are wrong, they’re not alone.
(italics mine)Why? Because you say so?
Another waste of bandwidth.
don’t throw it at me just because you can’t debate. If you have something intelligent to say, let’s hear it, otherwise I’m in no mood.
Please provide verifiable cites to suport your assertion that you are “the premier expert on American law”.
I don’t really care about your [del]bluster[/del]“mood”. Can you back up your claim, or not?
SarahWitch, insults are not allowed on the SDMB except in the BBQ Pit. Any further such may lead to sanctions against you. Please don’t do it again.