Superabound posted:yes, which makes their behavior all the more egregious. Soldiers at least have the excuse of psyche-fracturing environmental stress and completely contained government indoctrination camps to explain their inhumanity. Cops sit in a car all day and go home every night to eat a nice homecooked meal their cowed fearwife BETTER not have burned and then fall asleep drunk watching Duck Dynasty on a perfectly ass-rutted barcalounger
hating Cops less than Troops is a pretty obvious sign that youre really, really, REALLY white and spent most of your life in upper middle class neighborhoods
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cops uphold capitalism in the imperial core. they keep the bulk of white America feeling secure and loyal to the system by protecting their "property" (the fruits of imperialist plunder). they also sabotage internal dissent through a combination of brute force (MOVE Bombing, Fred Hampton assassination, mass incarceration, etc.) and trickery (much of the FBI's COINTELPRO and the local cops' Red Squads).
of course they kill much less people than Troops. so? this is only because repressing domestic dissent within the imperial core requires much less direct force than smashing counter-hegemonic regimes and foreign resistance movements. whites are largely bought off by wealth extracted from the Third World. the black underclass is utterly surrounded, so they have no chance to arm and organize themselves in a manner similar to--say--FARC or Hezbollah. what is stunning about US cops is despite the lack of coherent resistance and the relative safety of the job, they are still killing an incredible number of people (which is hard to count thanks to the decentralized nature of policing in the US) and otherwise making life for the underclass as miserable as possible through assaults, harassment, wrongful arrests and the like.
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:the basic premise of the really existing police force is not inherently illegitimate
jus ad bellum eh
tpaine posted:thirdplace posted:fo' sho, that was clear at the time and it is blindingly clear now. but i also don't excuse the people who enacted that top-down policy. plenty of blame to go around for everyone
yeah if you brook for one second the "just following orders" excuse you're among the worst people alive
i was no way absolving the actors, just pointing out that punishing only them (which we did anyway lmao) is doing a disservice to justice
tpaine posted:see if you ignore the millions of victims of Soldiers, cops are just as bad
Troops project government power. Cops protect it at its source. you need no more proof of that than how the nation responds to a couple dead cops compared to a couple thousand dead soldiers. not to mention ive personally known several cops and soldiers, and while theyre all pieces of inhuman trash compared to even the most deserving of their many victims, almost across the board the cops have expressed more openly fascist and racially hostile opinions than the Troops. and on top of that you have the significant number of police officers who are in fact former military themselves, usually the absolute worst of the bunch, incapable of shame, guilt, or the self-cleansing fire of PTSD, whose bloodlust and rapelust were not fully quenched by their experiences overseas, leaving them ready and eager to take the sins they learned in Hell and show them off to everyone back home
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:there's a lot of cop worship out there but it's not really new. in fact i'd say the new thing is how much open criticism police get, even if only really on the internet. 10 years ago if you posted what is today standard criticism of cops you'd get KEEP RAGING AGAINST THE MACHINE MOONFLOWER
ive actually noticed the opposite, but that might be just because 10 years ago everyone i knew was a drunk 22 year old rather than a shitty parent with a 401(k) and opinions about property values