paddymcdougall
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I'm worried about that stuff too, man, which was more-or-less my point: our police are militarized, do use excessive force, do spy on people, do seize property and possessions willy nilly and minorities are targeted far more excessively than people that share the same skin color that I do. Perhaps, instead of chastising the U.N. for pointing out the faults we know we have here, we should be speaking truth to power, that is, our governments -- federal, state and local. Look, I'm no fanboy of the U.N., but I'm not going to say that they're wrong -- **** is ****ed up here, man. You know?
Um... you do realize that any objective review of the US prison population, our justice system, how we craft law, the militarization of our police and the number of times lethal force is used, the rise of the security surveillance state well on our way to police state mentality should raise plenty of concerns.
Personally I think we need to take off the roses and sunshine view of our society and start to talk about that fact, not fiction, that we lead the planet of all reporting nations (including those like Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, Syria, the rest of the Middle East, most African nations including Egypt and Libya, etc.) in total incarceration rate and length of time served per crime committed. We have an obvious problem with disparity by race in the incarceration rate in comparison to actual drug use (go check with the AMA if you do not believe me.) We do in fact militarize our police and use various forms of surveillance against everyone in this nation in very questionalbe Constitutional ways. And of course no one thinks it exists, until they speak and confirm it, that we tend to profile and use force accordingly. Socially we have a series of concerns which end up with real fiscal costs and economic consequence.
By many sources the US no longer is in the lead when it comes to Freedom indexes and at the same time are in fact are quite violent when compared to some of these other nations. We have several cities in the US that rank high globally in violent crime. Go look up Chicago or Detroit if you do not believe me.
Now I'll agree, I find the UN to be largely ineffective and useless. We should have jumped out of that mess a long way back. Nothing but a bureaucratic nightmare made up of dubious characters. That said, the UN may be right on this one more than we are willing to admit.
Two great posts. We do have lots to worry about in this country, whether or not the UN points it out.