Certainly did not make him a better human being between condoning torture, kill lists, and his utter disregard for human liberties. I wonder how any child could respect such a bloodthirsty parent.
It's hard to employ smuggling as a protest against a free trade deal, since the point of a free trade deal is to reduce the set of goods that need to be smuggled. And the fines in the TPP are settled between governments, not between aggrieved governments and individual foreign citizens.
From leaks it suggests it involves companies suing governments for cash settlement.
Also, you are rather naive if you think 'free trade' means free trade, it will be nothing of the sort, it will raise barriers and make many goods and services more expensive.
This is neither responsive to my comment (which points out that TPP fines are settled between governments, and not to people who can "ignore" fines; somehow, this has become an argument against my comment?) nor falsifiable.
Not sure why you were downvoted because you're absolutely right. People forget that Gitmo isn't the only place the US keeps prisoners extrajudicially. The CIA operates numerous "secret sites" around the world where all kinds of terrible shit happens.
That is perhaps valid, though a counter argument is that in many police states such people are executed instead of imprisoned.
Typically it means the police are an instrument of whomever is controlling the state to keep themselves in power, e.g. per Wikipedia "Police state is a term denoting government that exercises power arbitrarily through the police. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_state).
I also like to define Japan as a police state, a polite one, granted, but policing was done for the convenience of the police, not for "justice" as we at least attempt. I.e. it's more important to close a case than get the real perpetrator, which was made easy by a "judicial" system with a combined "confession" and conviction rate exceeding 99.9% (really). Past tense because citizen jurors of some sort have recently been added to the mix, although I note that the history of that in England suggests it'll be a long time if ever before that becomes anything resembling the common law system.
> in many police states such people are executed instead of imprisoned.
Well, let's try a thought-experiment with some napkin-math, focusing on "man-hours dominated by the state per capita" and comparing incarceration to execution.
Assuming a stable incarceration rate of 1%, it follows that 1% of all "man-hours" in the nation is being taken, or about 88 man-hours per person per year.
Now, let's assume that another nation, the Bizarro States of America, achieves the same effect, but purely through less-frequent executions. The executed average a "lost remaining life" of 30,000 hours. (~35 years.)
That would require 0.29% of an execution per person per year. The BSA would have to execute 876 THOUSAND people every year to match the USA.
Cops kill 3 people a day, sounds like execution to me. Funny how dead men can't defend themselves or contradict the narrative police give -- which is often wrong when caught on tape.
I don't think you fully grok how many more people the US imprisons, a country would have to execute tens of thousands of people per year for decades to match the amount.
And more often right, at least in the tapes I and people I trust have analyzed. In theory (yes, I know, you can stop laughing), per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_v._Garner police can only use lethal force in self-defense and in defense of others, no shooting a non-violent fleeing criminal, they have no more rights in that area than us armed civilians.
I wonder if you grok the concept of per-capita statistics, or comparing like demographics, and I'll note that one of the hallmarks of modern police states is slaughtering a lot more people than they publicly acknowledge.
Its bizarre how people will say something when it flies in the face of observable reality.
the US police state slaughters more people than is acknowledged, it requires a UK newspaper to get the correct amount.
Cite court cases all you want, they directly contradict what the police get away with everyday, you plainly see on tape them beating and killing people, planting evidence, destroying evidence and private property, and it happens without consequence.
You are a police apologist, defending murderous thugs.
I guess it's too fine a distinction for your tastes; in my book you might say there are are:
Good cops in a few rural places where they're too busy to be bad or thugs.
Bad cops who don't directly commit crimes but are part of the Blue Wall of Silence that covers up for:
Thug cops who assault citizens and their dogs (and see elsewhere in this discussion for a cat executed by a cop, but that seems to be rare).
(There's also dirty cops who e.g. get paid to do stuff like look the other way, but we're not talking about them and I don't think they're now hardly as bad a problem as thug cops, but they are another argument for ending the War On Drugs.)
I believe the majority of cops are "bad cops" per the above, which does not mean there aren't a lot of thug cops, neither of whom I make apologies for their crimes.
One reason the US has a policing problem is because of the reflexive and thoughtless defense people give them.
How many more Chicago Blacksites, 'accidental' deaths while in custody, and shooting and killing of unarmed citizens do people need to have happen before the cop apologists stop their hero worship excuse making?
