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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   30974 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Is that data collected anywhere or is it another thing where you could only find local data and not everywhere due to how fragmented the police force is?

I'm unsure where Radley Balko got his data and I'm not sure where my copy is, but my memory of his book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, claims the figure in 2013 to be around 50,000 annually, although whether or not each of these raids where SWAT teams are used can be correctly characterized as "police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building" is another question.

but would see nothing wrong with it if a corporation bought up all roads and public squares in his city and instituted a ban against voicing the same position on company property (along with a host of other house rules)

it turns out this has happened, or something akin to it, and the public was broadly against it and resulted in multiple SCOTUS decisions prohibiting that activity; the first examples were "company towns" (Marsh v. Alabama) and another more recent example was malls (Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robinson)

the state didn't propose to force the companies to surrender property to the public hand, they forced the companies to be restricted in similar ways to the state when it comes to first amendment protections; I am unsure about the public's response to the SCOTUS decisions

and putting people in jail for 25 years to life for all sorts of one-off transgressions comes off as nuts and authoritarian to us, as to million-dollar fines and jail terms for software piracy (...)

unless you're talking about "one-off transgressions" like premeditated or felony murder, this doesn't really happen

million dollar fines and jail terms for piracy, like when the Pirate Bay founders were imprisoned for a year and had to pay $1m fines? or the kino.to guy who got like a 4 year sentence? I agree the US gives stiffer prison terms and fines for piracy, but let's not go overboard here.

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