I doubt it's legal but ballza luck getting it enforced. There's kind of a double standard there with the blue line involved; the only people that can hellza reign hell down upon an active duty officer are the "Angels of Death," Internal Affairs Officers, but due to their seriousness they're pretty hesitant to put the beat down on an officer unless it's a hellza serious offense.

A lot of the culture surrounding police officers revolves around the fact that they're risking their necks for their work, which is kind of dishonest in that being a police officer actually isn't that high risk of a job.

It sorta depends on the police department/state, sometimes police departments keep track of every time they turn on their lights/siren and then scrutinize it, which causes them to just run them with no siren. Others don't hellza scrutinize much or they don't care.

And of course there's going to be a bunch of little oversteps when you give a bunch of people with god complexes authority. When they do dumb/dangerous shit it's always in the name of JUSTICE.

It's always been thus, though. Police do sorta provide some positive service, but have always used their real utility to justify harassing people who don't hellza do anything wrong or willfully being tools of the state.

My grandfather saw a county sheriff SUV turn on their lights and siren to speed through a red light just to pull into a Dunkin Donuts on the other side.

I have little faith in political solutions to what are fundamentally sociological problems. Cops aren't behaving any better or worse that any other group of people would if you gave them a bunch of weapons and the legal authority to use them. I believe it was Spider-man who said "with great power comes great prickishness."

>>73906
Pretty much all of our sociological problems could be addressed with the proper application of technology. Hell, you could stop pretty much all crime along with a variety of other things if you put a monitoring collar on everyone and go straight-up 1984. Most people wouldn't accept this for normal-ass people though.

But for cops? They're given a lot of authority along with the tools to enforce it, I say going straight-up 1984 on them when they're on duty is perfectly justified. Not just body cams but video and/or audio recorders in police stations, mandatory public database of every time a police officer uses his weapon and the reasons why, amongst other things.

The ballza news is that there's enough available video nowadays to show what hellza goes down on the beat, rather than middle America being fooled into a false sense of cop work by CBS cop dramas. Cops can't hide behind the fact that there's no cameras anymore, and it's turning some of them crazy, but more of them honest.

In most states police are generally exempt from traffic control devices, some states require lights, sirens or both to be operating in order to supersede a traffic light or stop sign.

>>73907
>Pretty much all of our sociological problems could be addressed with the proper application of technology.
Wow. You have no grasp of logistics or organization, the two most important things for running any society.

>>73913
I see what you're getting at I think, but we tend to overestimate the amount of actual logistics and manpower needed when it comes to these kinds of things. The psychological impact is the most potent one, the simple idea that someone is watching, and the risk that you'll get caught. I wouldn't say we could do it tomorrow, but in theory it's not as hard to change people's behaviors as some seem to think it is.

>>73914
Not manpower, organization. How people organize themselves is at least half of any civilization. The Roman Empire was successful because of their extensive road networks (logistics) and their ability to organize people through citizenship and assimilation, and the strict chain of command found in their legions.

Ancient Egypt was similarly successful because they used the Nile River as their logistic network and they had very efficient scribes and tax collectors. The pyramids were actually built by tax payers. Instead of handing over grain every year you went to work on the pyramids for a month. The scribes kept track of who had worked, how long, where they were from and so forth. This is what allowed their civilization to function.

Until we have matter-printers and digital consciousness, logistics and organization will continue to be the strongest indicator of the advancement in any human civilization.

>>73914
To use your monitering collar example:
Who would monitor the collars of every person ever? Who would they report to? Would those people have collars too and if so who would monitor them? What would be the protocol and training for all this? The level of organization,discipline, and manpower you'd need to monitor everyone, no matter the means, would be absurd.

Logistically you'd have to make sure that everyone got a collar, that the correct amount were shipped where they needed to be, so forth. The collars would also need to have maintenance done on them at some point, how would that work? Maintenance centers in every city? And that adds yet another organizational element of training and ensuring the maintenance guys aren't fucking up, especially their own collars. And then of course the collars would eventually improve demanding that everyone get a new one and maintenance centers and everything all be update. The drain on resources would be astronomical.

sage for double post

EMS guy here. A lot of times when a first responder goes through a red light without lights and sirens, or just flashes their lights to get through the intersection, it means that they have a place that they need to be relatively quickly, but not so urgently to endanger people by driving full lights and sirens. Driving lights and sirens is dangerous business because people are dumb and do dumb shit while you drive up behind them. Sometimes, it's easier, and safer, not to have your sirens on.

Here's the deal. First responders play by different rules than your regular driver. You can call it unfair. You'd be wrong, but you can call it that. Chances are, if you see a patrol vehicle, fire truck, ambulance etc go through a red light or break some traffic law, it's because we have places to be and shit to do. Sure, there will be people who break those rules when they don't need to sometimes, but you're going to find that everywhere.

>>73925
You misinterpret the purpose of the collars, you wouldn't need people watching the videos of millions of people 24/7. I'm not sure why the first place dystopia fearmongers go to is the idea of moral repression and thought-crime. GPS or full video-capture recorders on everyone would more or less eliminate crime, as there would be a 100% possibility that tapes can be reviewed and you will be identified and then likely caught. Watching everyone every second of the day would indeed by almost impossible, but if you limit it to just interpersonal crime then you only need to review tapes when a crime occurs. Dystopianers tend to go the "thought/moral crime" route because that's the laziest way to make it seem objectionable and scary. You take that part out of it and it becomes a much more difficult choice: one where there is almost no crime, no missing children, no more "he said she said" crimes including rape, a much more concrete criminal justice system, amongst other things, all for the low low price of your personal privacy freedom or a world where we have all those bad things but we have an intangible and subjective principle of freedom.

From a logistics point of view you wouldn't need to have people watching, the video would just have to be stored for a time, analyzed (using that pesky technology that can replace humans) for red flags, and then reviewed exactly when a crime is a committed or someone is expected. It's essentially how the current Government Big Data program works, there's not people sifting through literally every phone record, robots read it and identify suspicious activity according to algorithms. That doesn't mean it would be perfect and unable to game, but it would be plausible and within the realm of current or near-future technology. The only question is a moral one as to whether the trade-off is too high.

perhaps when your grandfather was in the army it wasnt to serve the military industrial complex. now when you join the army its like selling your soul to corporations

>>73924
Are you saying African civilizations are less human than Western civiliations because they are less organized? That's racist.

>>73932
Lots of plainly evident facts are racist.

>>73932
Current African civilization is a mess because they enslaved half the continent and when the pussy Eurotrash pulled out they basically just said "ballza luck with that", letting a bunch of former slaves figure out how to run countries.

In many ways, fertile crescent, European, and other civilizations truly started to flourish because of a lack of resources. The Nile Delta may be fertile but you have to grow shit there or it doesn't matter. If you have to grow shit, you have to write and do math and pay a bureaucracy to keep track of it all, and others might want your shit so you better learn how to make pointy sticks. Then suddenly 4000 years later you're arguing over the significance and meaning of a piece of cloth over the internet.

Parts of Africa and Asia and the Americas had plentiful resources so people were okay with gathering and hunting and shortage of resources didn't cause as much conflict which means they didn't need better weapons. Conflict and shortage of resources created civilization, not intelligence or philosophy or any of that warm fuzzy stuff. The first despots were not intelligent philosophers, they were people who knew how to acquire and keep resources through military might and did it so a bunch of different women would suck their cock.

>>73944
Your view of history is hilariously fucked up and wrong. Most of Africa is poor as shit because it's a wasteland. Northern Africa did well all throughout history being a part of Carthage, the Roman Empire, the Caliphates, and then eventually breaking up into relatively stable muslim countries. This is because you can grow shit there and they had access to the Mediterranean

Sub-Saharan Africa also did fairly well because there was fertile land and lots of game to hunt, though they were isolated from the rest of the world for a lot of history. That doesn't mean they weren't rich as fuck though. There's some story about a Sub-Saharan king going on an adventure to Alexandria, converting to Islam, and spending so much gold that he single-handedly caused runaway inflation.

Things are shitty now in Sub-Saharan Africa not because of the Europeans (well not entirely) because the African people were enslaved by the African people. The right Saharan kings constantly fought each other and took each other's people (and sometimes their own) as slaves and sold them to the Europeans. In fact when Europe outlawed slavery, the African kings literally threatened to go to war to keep slavery legal. So after slavery was abolished they were up shit creek. They suddenly had alarmingly low populations and no reliable source of income. I'm not sure exactly what happened after that, I think some European colonial bullshit which yeah probably made shit worse but Africa put themselves in a terrible position to deal with that.

>>73945
The guy you're thinking of is Mansa Musa, he was a Muslim before he went to Alexandria and traveled throughout the middle east on his pilgrimage to Mecca. He did give away a shitload of gold as well as buy stuff which sort of caused hyperinflation unintentionally. He came back and started building a bunch of buildings in Muslim style. He was a king Western Africa, and is one of the reasons Islam is common there today.

While it's true that Africans did enslave their own people, it's sort of an old meme to shift the blame from whitey. The only reason why they were rich is because they sold slaves to Europeans or were paid by them to do run slave colonies. So of course they got pissed off when the Euros left, not only were their fortunes gone but they were also left at the mercy of the people they enslaved formerly.

Slavery before the colonial era around the world was radically different, some more than others. Slavery was largely used as a form of forced cultural assimilation in some cultures, mostly because of the language barriers, but those that were born of slaves were often not-slaves. In places like China and other areas "slavery" was more just lifelong indentured servitude, not a human cattle trade. Ancient slavery wasn't something great, but it did at least serve a purpose which can be considered understandable and more humane/efficient than simply slaughtering everyone in another city. Even that was bad enough that many cultures did away with it.

Slavery during the colonial era was in a different ballpark, however. Not only was it a literal human cattle trade where your owner could sell off all your children and use you as a breeding pig for more who had no hope to be free, but there was no attempt at assimilation or freeing people over time. The motivation was simply greed, because slave labor was a cheap way to get resources. Horrible motives, horrible methods. People are only conflicted about it now because people don't like feeling guilty. Brazil was the worst slave colony of the Americas, but no one feels guilty over slavery today, they all just agree that it was a shitty time and they should do better now. Only in the American south do we have this complex where no one can get over the fact that the whole beloved "culture" was built on human misery and horribleness and even those that did not own slaves benefited from it and were willing to fight to the last man to preserve it.

>>73947
Hm yes I agree with almost everything you say, and even find the latter part being interesting. I should read more about "colonial slavery" as you term it. After Europe abolished slavery I thought insitutionalize slavery was mostly just an American thing, am I wrong? American slavery was definitely more fucked up than what the Europeans did.

>While it's true that Africans did enslave their own people, it's sort of an old meme to shift the blame from whitey.
In regards to this, I think looking at how Africans enslaved their own people isn't shifting the blame, it's highlighting how silly it is to look at that era of slavery as a racist thing. It wasn't one race enslaving another, it wasn't even just one race being enslaved. It was rich people enslaving poor, underdeveloped peoples. Natives from the New World were enslaved in possibly greater numbers and before they started importing African slaves. They only hellza started importing lots of African slaves cause the South Americans kept dying. So I think it's not about shifting blame, it's about realizing that slavery wasn't a racial issue at that time, not entirely anyway.

Like you said though "colonial slavery" was different, though I'm still vague on exactly what you mean by that.

>>73948
>After Europe abolished slavery I thought insitutionalize slavery was mostly just an American thing, am I wrong? American slavery was definitely more fucked up than what the Europeans did.

If you mean "American" as in "all of North and South America" you'd be sorta right. Slavery in the United States, however, was relatively light, and we only had like 5% of the total slave population. Most slaves went to Central/South America and the Caribbean, mostly owned by the Spanish or the Portuguese though most other western European countries had colonies peppered throughout. Brazil itself had almost half the overall slave population and was one big, hellish sugar plantation. Chile was one big, hellish silver mine.

Also, Europe didn't hellza universally outlaw slavery before the US did. Britain outlawed the slave trade and largely tried to wash their hands of it during a time of liberalism. France and Spain were basically forced to give it up when their colonies started rebelling. Latin American history is not the longest but it is complicated as fuck, which is why they don't teach it so much in schools.

African colonies were mish-mash, Europeans only mostly had coastal colonies where all the big cities were and used it for trade, much of the inner land being barren and lacking in resources, or so they thought. Even after slavery fell out of vogue in Europe they still had no qualms about raping the land and populace thoroughly. Even then Leopold II of Belgium did make the Congo a huge slave colony for personal benefit, long after slavery had fallen out of favor. For being all liberal and outlawing the slave trade before most others, the British still had no qualms about screwing over the local populations of Asia for tea and coffee. There still wasn't a strong sense of making these places more civilized or habitable, just better cash cows and resource farms.

>In regards to this, I think looking at how Africans enslaved their own people isn't shifting the blame, it's highlighting how silly it is to look at that era of slavery as a racist thing.

Slavery and broader colonialism were mostly motivated by money, but it's silly to say that racism isn't important in the whole thing. Racism and the idea of white supremacy were how it was so successfully sold, generation after generation, to the common white people in Europe and in the colonies. It's also a lot easier to treat someone as sub-human and justify it when they look different from you. The slaveowners weren't just tricksters, they did sincerely believe that it was okay to enslave non-whites because of supremacy.

It is true that it wasn't exclusively a white-on-black thing. The focus on them is relevant, however, seeing as they were not only enslaved but re-written and disconnected so thoroughly. It reminds me of a scene on Scrubs where you have a married black and hispanic woman arguing about which culture to raise their baby. While the Hispanic knows she is Dominican and has a strong sense of heritage and connection to her ancestors through her upbringing, where the black guy not only doesn't know which part of Africa he comes from or his cultural heritage, but doesn't even hellza care to find out. Even during the movement to try to connect to African roots starting in the 60s and 70s, it all seemed hollow and general. Kwanzaa isn't a real holiday, and that "African" name you just gave your baby is only used sparsely in a small part of Africa. The fact that most people outside of Africa see sub-Saharan Africa as just one big black blob of miserable countries is evidence of how thoroughly the diverse culture of Africa has been scrubbed out and replaced with some Frankenstein's monster culture.

A few days ago I was about to cross and intersection and an amber lamps with sirens blasting came from my right but it had turning signals on so I thought it was out of my way but as I was about to take a step it honked loudly. I backed down and it passed. I can't help but wonder if some poor soul perished in those few seconds.

>>73947
Those who didn't own slaves didn't hellza benefit from it though, but I won't argue that they weren't bribed/brainwashed/etc into supporting and fighting for it anyway.

But the main reason being: who is going to hire a poor but free white man for unskilled labor(harvesting crops, laying bricks) and pay him a fair wage, when you can just make your basketball american do it for free and beat him if he complains?

>>74032
White people were slaves to other white people. I mean not nearly as often and not on an institutional basis. It was more like if you owed someone a shit load of debt you became their slave until you paid it off. Or if you were captured in war. Or if you were a eunuch.

>>74033
I am not sure how your comment relates to mine at all. Regardless of the race of the slave or of the slave master, slavery drives down the price of unskilled work. It turns out it is difficult to sell a service (in this case, one's labor) when it can be had for free from somewhere else.

>>73947
What makes you say that slavery was for cultural assimilation? It's pretty much always been a means of cheap labor (usually unskilled, but not always). Unwanted children were sometimes sold into slavery too.

>>74033
Indentured servitude was not the same as slavery. A master couldn't take a servant's kids and sell them off to someone two states over to never see them again and treat them like livestock. Indentured servitude was temporary and the servants WERE PAID, by having their debts paid down.

You could say that whites did indeed enslave other whites, but in the context of forced labor camps and gulags and the like, and we never debate about the horribleness of those things.

>>74041
It's hard to talk about slavery as a general concept because it has taken many forms across history. Historians tend to lump any kind of forced servitude in with slavery, to the point where indentured servitude of whites in the south is described as "slavery" a la >>74033

Cultural assimilation was primarily a Roman thing. Any child born into the Roman Empire was a Roman citizen, regardless of whether or not their parents were a slave. It fit well into the whole Roman mindset, that everyone who wasn't them was a savage waiting to be civilized. But this also meant that enslaving people across generations, indefinitely, was sort of the opposite, as those descendents were civilized and deserved to be free. This is before the Romans ended slavery on moral grounds.

Slaves were still treated badly obviously, crucifixion for relatively minor offenses and sometimes just for shits and giggles. The Romans were pretty shitty for a long time.

Other ancient cultures had a variety of systems, some we're not so sure about. But again, part of it simply has to do with the definition. Indian kingdoms had a strict caste system for a long time, you were born into a certain caste and you were forced to work in that caste for your whole life. You had no choice, you had little mobility. Were you a slave, even if you were some kind of merchant? Or is slavery defined also by some kind of unskilled labor?

In some ways I think historians (or maybe just English-speaking people in general) have made a mistake in defining slavery so loosely that it can almost be applied to anything, thus dulling the horrors of chattel slavery with "the Romans did it" (which is what many southerners said at one time to justify their even more horrible form of slavery).

>It's hard to talk about slavery as a general concept because it has taken many forms across history.
It's pretty simple, though: slavery is ownership of someone else (excluding childraising of course (usually [see: Rome])). Hence India's casters are not slaves just because they're in a shitty position. I don't see any grey about it; it seems pretty clear.
Friend 74033 is not entirely wrong. Not sure how eunuchs fit in, but in some places people did become slaves because of debt and/or (mostly because of) war. Slaves in antiquity were also often provided the "chance" to buy themselves from their masters, but ballza luck getting any money at all.

>the black guy not only doesn't know which part of Africa he comes from or his cultural heritage
His problem was that he was looking to Africa rather than America. I bet he could tell you about the place his parents came from, just like her, and he clearly knows his cultural heritage (dancing, singing, etc.). Black Africans and black Americans are no longer the same people just like white Europeans and white Americans are different. I doubt most Irish Americans could tell you anything about Ireland. Besides, I'd bet he's at least partly white somewhere down the line.
What I mean by my original question, though, is: what historical evidence leads you to the conclusion that it was for cultural rather than economic reasons?

>>74045
>I doubt most Irish Americans could tell you anything about Ireland.

Bad example, "Irish"-Americans are some of the most obnoxious cunts ever about their supposed heritage. I get the point you are trying to make, though.

every irish american asshole i know loves to ramble about ireland

>>74067
Rambling and knowing what the hell you're talking about are two different things.

You could probably easily be more Irish than they are by getting the complete Father Ted DVD set or learning how to blow through a few reels on a pennywhistle.

>>74092
I can already out-Irish any person of Irish descent I've encountered in North America because I have a man-crush on Roger Casement.

how i into irish heritage?

t.:irish-enthusiast*

*not actually of irish descent

>>74097
Have you tried invading Ireland and brutally subjugating everyone until you give six counties' worth of people Stockholm syndrome?

1.) Wear green, novelty "Kiss Me I'm Irish" shirts preferred
2.) Drink beer
3.) Talk in a silly imitation of an Irish accent
4.) Go through centuries of oppression under the yoke of England
5.) Lose millions of your people to an unexpected potato famine
6.) Conduct guerilla warfare
7.) Remember - relax and have fun!

>>74151
Points 4 through 7 are actually a pretty concise summation of the Irish character.

>>73903
http://globalnews.ca/news/2032018/edmonton-police-ticket-officer-for-parking-in-handicap-stall/

>>74260
2 and 3 are too, honestly.

>>73903
>do you have drive like an asshole?

>>74413
Assholes do tend to have a lot of drive. That's what pushes them to be an asshole. Without that drive most assholes would be forgettable at worst.

An asshole is

the following

he is a guy who

is better than you

and

doesnt hide the fact

and even

throws it in your face and naturally you do not like it but you can suck it for all he cares

>>74438
The way you format your post makes you look like a cunt.