I mean, depends- if I steal from my employer I go to jail, if my employer steals my wages they get a fine.
If I murder someone in cold blood on the street, I might not make it off the scene before getting gunned down; if a government agent summarily executes a protester, they might get a couple days vacation and a heft goFundme payout.
Nothing new there, though... if, for instance, in 1955 a random black kid has some white guys think he looked at the wrong woman in the wrong way, he might get violently killed that day; the men who do that killing might never face -any- consequences.
So the answer to your question is highly variable and has been for all of the time that anyone I know has been alive. The application of law in the US is and has always been mostly determined by class and race.
One of the pleasant things, though, is that if that kind of thing is on the table you probably have some kind of moral imperative to start doing something about it.
Previously I felt like a hyperbolic nerd, and now I have a whole lot of new friends all working on the same stuff. Wheee. Go team. I hate it.
Fortunately it feels very much the other direction, lately- more folks seeing the dangers, more willingness to take the long bet. Fewer folks at brunch.
That's a bet some of have been taking for a while, though it's oftent felt dumb, and we haven't needed a great shocking occasion to do it.
It's been this way for a while, though. It's just that the stakes of the things they are willing to tell folks to "2+2=5" about seem to have dropped substantially. It used to be about the goodness of US foreign interventions and, say, "imperial capitalism" in general, and they made plenty of fun propaganda to support it: "Red Dawn" or "First Blood"- quality and fun propaganda.
When they started kidnapping folks from our communities who've been peacefully chilling and being community members for decades, it got a lot less abstract, I think.
If it helps, understand that it becomes ever easier to get folks to disbelieve the government when they can see it; it's far harder to get the average brunch-enjoyer to care when they are doing a central american coup... much easier to care when they are shooting yt wmn in the streets.
Famously, there are plenty of stories in the west about eastern-bloc countries and propaganda, where everyone knows that that the papers don't tell the truth but the truth circulates regardless.
So maybe don't worry about the false narratives- worry about the recouperative powers of capital to pull all those radicalized liberals back into the fold instead of using a mass line of organization to force structural changes.
In addition to this, using the search feature is a much easier way to surface content. I find the site pretty useless, but I have a couple sets of title and then comment terms that work ell for me- that's how I found this thread.
Honestly, the long term effect that I've felt of pepper spray is that it's made me decidedly more radical in my politics. Like, I went from just wanting to hold my opinions and play my music to actively organizing with my local anarchist collectives.
I believe a lot of folks feel that way- I know a lot of folks who were pretty moderate in their actions and outlooks that have experienced the state using chemical weapons on them and who are now much, much more radical in their outlook.
Yeh, the poster should have also at least name checked the administrative detention system of CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam, which seems like a reasonable test-bed for many of the recent and horrific systems and a kind of common ancestor to both of the US ICE agency and its cousins in the Levant.
Leaving that bit of history out certain seems like a missed point of history, and absent that your parent post's point might indeed seem a little reach-y.
When going back into history, examples become too abstract, a thing that other people did, in different times. The example I used is not only recent, it is still ongoing. It is right there in front of domestic authoritarians, showing them how it can be done in this day and age. And it is right there in front of the general population, showing them what can and will be done to them if they do not make it clear to their governments that they will not tolerate such conduct. Therefore I insist that I used the correct example.
think of ELF/Earth First in the 90s with "ecoterrorism"... plenty of stops between that and, say, the Haymarket affair. Or hell, much of the anti-indigenous genocide could probably be described using the term "counter-insurgency", which is closely related to how the US gov. thinks of terrorism.
If I murder someone in cold blood on the street, I might not make it off the scene before getting gunned down; if a government agent summarily executes a protester, they might get a couple days vacation and a heft goFundme payout.
Nothing new there, though... if, for instance, in 1955 a random black kid has some white guys think he looked at the wrong woman in the wrong way, he might get violently killed that day; the men who do that killing might never face -any- consequences.
So the answer to your question is highly variable and has been for all of the time that anyone I know has been alive. The application of law in the US is and has always been mostly determined by class and race.
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