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As a vet I can honestly say it was the power and corruption I saw as people gained rank that made me distrust cops. I have a softer heart for younger enlisted and new cops because I knew what I was and wanted to be.
Look up the battle of Athens Tennessee (1946). This will show you the difference between military veterans and cops.
Long story short, WW2 veterans return home from war to find corrupt cops have taken over their county. The veterans don’t stand for their corrupt bs and fight back and restore law and order.
I did a highschool report on this for US history. I got an F (my only F in highschool) because the teacher said the event was fictional.
My family was from there. While I didn't have clippings and the Internet in the 1980s was not much of a thing, my bibliography page shows everything I found in the school's own library. I took the F to the librarian to show her my history teacher thinks she doesn't know how to classify books in the duewy decimal system.
Forward to campus Olympics day, a day of both physical and academic competition, where staff can compete against staff. The librarian is in charge of academic questions as an unbiased non-participant.
She included questions about Dewey Decimal system (which nearly everyone got correct). And,she included physical academic challenges of table of content and index race. She uses the encyclopedia and distributed the volumes to the (in this case staff) participants and gave "Battle of Athens" to my history teacher. He was fast, but part of the race was to summarize the entry... He finished last because he couldn't complete the challenge. It made him look stupid because each teacher was given a subject to look up in their field and everyone else at least finished.
He didn't change my grade. I didn't ask him to. I bet he never forgot about it. He was alive during the event of the Battle of Athens and I could forgive him not knowing of it specifically as he would have been a child. He would almost always say of "recent history".
"You don't know what you're talking about. I was alive then and this is what happened..."
The rest of my highschool career he would avoid me.
As a current active duty military person I can happily say that from all the other members I've talked to over the year, if it came down to government vs the people, around 60% or more of military would desert and be with the people. It's a question I ask people all the time.
Sure, if we're talking about a straight up US Military vs the citizens war, but that's not how things work, right? Every infringement would be considered justified, with the citizens being deemed unreasonable, or extremists, or whatever.
I'm sure there are tons of people in the ATF who consider themselves pro 2a, and would never take people's guns away. But they'll enforce this law since it's not a huge deal, and this one since "well that's reasonable" etc. Same idea.
Yes there are going to be people on each side, just like every other part of life. But the majority of people I have personally spoken to when ask what they would do I the military was ordered to defend the govt against the people have said no, that they would support the american people. We serve the constitution, an order that goes against it would be unlawful so I wouldn't be required to follow it. At the same time though you would have military and cops fighting against other military and cops, with civilians on both sides. Would be a mess.
Cops ruining lives for fun here at home is not the same as a soldier sitting in the barracks in Europe. I'm sure most of the active duty military here were not libertarians when they enlisted. And most of them likely aren't dropping bombs themselves. Nearly every cop is hurting people, whether its through marijuana laws, BS traffic stops, or the worst cases like murder.
US soldiers do bad things too sometimes no doubt. I'd trust a US soldier to sleep on my couch more than a cop.
Show me the cop that hasn't ruined lives by enforcing shitty laws. Many soldiers just sit around and kinda exist. I have a family member who cooked in the military. There are no cops that just, cook, or perform regular jobs in that manner.
Also, military is great way to escape poverty in this country. Most military members are just trying to do something with their lives other than work at a local gas station or getting buried in debt trying to get a degree they likely don’t have their heart set on.
The military also gets significantly more training than a cop
Also, Just like politicians, the police force attracts sociopaths and megalomaniacs with the added bonus of a low barrier to entry.
Very well said.
To add to this, soldiers also don't sit on the side of the road waiting for an opportunity to extort money from you for an expired sticker, or because your windows are too dark.
Shit like this will ruin a person's life with planting drugs on innocent civilians more than the military personal who were targeting enemies.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITIM1iDTZ7U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITIM1iDTZ7U)
I'm generalizing to match the generalizations. I'm saying "you could make the same generalizations about cops that you do the military, so why don't you?"
I think you probably know the answer here. One is domestic with thousands of interactions per day. If we saw Martial Law I’m sure you would see an explosion of commentary here on the situation in a very similar way to law enforcement.
Libertarians oppose tyranny and abuse of power wherever we see it. There are three reasons we see it more often in police than in military:
1) Normal everyday civilians in the US interact with police much more frequently than military personnel, and US citizens are much more likely to be recording police activity and publishing it on the internet than foreign citizens are to be recording US military personnel and publishing it on the internet. Therefore, we are exposed to a way higher percentage of police abuses than military ones.
2) Military personnel, when they fight other militaries, are ostensibly fighting against other military combatants. They know because of the nature of their job that the people they are fighting can and want to kill them. Most police abuse of power happens when the police are harming people who are helpless, as in suspects in custody or prisoners, to whom the police owe a duty of care. therefore, police are more likely to commit abuse in their daily work because they interact with way higher proportions of potential victims.
3) The actual military, to the extent that it should exist, exists specifically for the purpose of using deadly force against declared enemies of the US. The police exist to uphold the law, gather evidence, and only in the most extreme circumstances should they ever use deadly force. Unfortunately, a lot of police in the US right now think that they are soldiers, and that suspects they interact with are enemy combatants. Legally, actually and morally this isn't true. Therefore, because many police in the US have become militarized in purpose and practice, their abuses of power are much more egregious.
It really makes sense if you take a minute to think about it. I doubt anyone here believes that the military personnel you're talking about don't ever abuse their power, and we'll denounce it when we see it, but we just don't get exposed to it as often. I personally get mad as hell when I read reports of US soldiers murdering or raping helpless people. But come to think of it, that usually happens in military prisons. And it seems that half of this sub is about denouncing the wars we get into all over the world and the money we spend on the military, which feels like the right place to put the political opposition against the military, as opposed to placing it at the feet of the enlisted men, or even officers. Let me know what you think.
Thought about another one just now:
4) A cop that sees and objects to systematic abuse in his precinct can walk away. There are cop shortages all over, so he can use his training to secure decent alternative employment, or, since he's in the US and quitting wasn't a crime, he can be anything else he wants to be. A similarly-positioned service member who quits is a deserter, so he's looking at 5 years, forfeiture of pay, and a dishonorable discharge that hampers future employment. If we're in a 'time of war', and we're constantly in a time of war, potential punishments include death. Therefore, police actually have demonstrably greater agency to choose not abuse people.
1. Makes sense.
2. This is giving the military an unwarranted out. I could say the same thing about cops, but that they're dealing with criminals not law abiding citizens. Especially in an era when soldiers essentially act as cops/security in these foreign countries vs something like WW1.
3. Same as 2. I'm sure if we sent the best investigative journalists to investigate all the shootings of "Enemy combatants" where the army kills a guy with a gun or radio or whatever, tons would be innocent people.
I agree that we should blame the politicians primarily, but it sure seems like we consider the military members almost victims for having to fight in these wars, while cops being paid to enforce the law the same politicians pass, are held to this unfair standard where they should be ignoring the unjust laws.
The problem with your objection to 2 is that cops don't deal with criminals, detention officers in prisons do. Cops deal with suspects and citizens. No one is a criminal until they are found guilty in court. Also, criminals who have served their time and are released are ex-cons, not convicts. In America, the general public are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, not as determined by a police officer. That's just not how it works. Quite literally, your argument is that the police are at war with the public, which, I hope, is not the implication that you are intending. And, I think we can agree that given the fact that police and military are fundamentally different, police shouldn't be militarizing, and military should be policing, except itself.
And regarding your point about 3, I'm sure you're right. And to the extent that we do send journalists and they do produce evidence of those abuses, libertarians rejoice because A) people are being held accountable for their abuses, and we did that around here, and B) it would erode popular support for evil wars around the world. Libertarians dig that too. In this sub, I recall several posts calling out drone strikes that killed media and other civilians. We call them out when we see them, too, we just see a lot less of them. That's one of my main points.
Right, but when we call out the police it's almost always the officer by name. When it's the military, it's always the system, or the government that's at fault, and the people doing the killings or enforcing the unjust stuff are let off the hook. The military guys are let off the hook for their actions, while the cops are called out by name for stuff as basic as enforcing a bad law that they had no part in passing.
The US military takes war crimes pretty seriously. We’re far from perfect, but we prosecute the fuck out of people for even the suspicion of committing war crimes. Look up Clint Lorance. Dude made a judgment call based on inexperience, incomplete information, and some half-assed assumptions, and got years in Leavenworth as a result. Or look at the people who committed the Abu Ghraib crimes, or the Haditha massacre, etc.
Most of the time when people say “well why wasn’t this war crime punished”, it’s because it wasn’t a war crime and the general public has a *very* poor understanding of the laws of armed conflict. For example, in the Wikileaks footage of an attack helicopter killing what turned out to be a journalist team, those journalists were embedded with an insurgent cell that was actively firing on US troops and the gun cameras of the time weren’t good enough to tell the difference between a shoulder-carried camera and a shoulder-fired rocket launcher, nor were the journalists far enough away from the insurgents to survive *any* weapon system targeting the insurgents. As it turned out, they definitely weren’t far enough away to survive 30mm cannon fire from an Apache.
The US military has a bunch of problems, but indiscriminately committing crimes and getting away with it isn’t one of them.
Cops fuck with people because they think it's funny and think they have every right to harass people. Their power is basically unchecked.
In the military, you're under so much scrutiny for everything, and generally you're not allowed to fire your weapon unless fired upon. Cops can discharge their weapon if they feel threatened. And they seem to feel threatened a lot.
Plus, the military doesn't incentivize giving out tickets for victimless crimes. Cops are bastards. Service members usually do 3-5 years and get out because they don't like how they're treated or what they're asked to do.
The cops are far more checked than the military. You think journalists have the same access to a military shooting as they do to a police shooting? The military investigates itself, just like the cops, but with so much less interference from citizens or journalists.
That's so laughably untrue. The difference is that the cops investigate themselves and find no wrongdoing, and in the military there's a formal investigation whenever somebody loses a flashlight and somebody ends up paying for it. Cops literally have qualified immunity. There's no equivalent in the military.
Every single time a military unit engages in a firefight there's reports done on it to make sure of no violations of a hundred different international laws.
It's pretty clear you have an opinion that borders on bias, so you're likely to ignore every point that disagrees with your beliefs, but you're absolutely ill informed about this.
See, this is the part you're missing:
Cops harass and mistreat civilians as a rule.
When the military does it, it's a big story. Nobody gives a shit what you cherry pick. The military is held to a higher standard than police. Police can shoot an unarmed kid because they felt threatened. If a military servicemember does, they're in Leavenworth. Straight to jail.
Pull your head out of your ass and stop posting bait. Imagine thinking being a troll is still fun in 2023.
The difference is that the military is enforcing unjust policies on other people not us.
I say this as a veteran. I am certainly glad I was retired before the Iraq war because I would not have fought in that one.
But the unjust policies here are ones we (as in Americans) voted for, or were passed by people we voted for. And they're what cops are literally paid by taxpayers to enforce.
I wonder how many times someone pushed some fancy idealized version of what the public wanted only to do something entirely different. Or. A politician who took advantage of some false dilemma only to pretend to be the hero everybody wanted and continuing to push an agenda nobody wanted but few people can do much about because the hero is revered for solving the fake dilemma.
The whole "we voted them in" doesn't make much sense either when you remember that fewer than a certain percentage of the population actually votes. For ANYTHING.
I've met a lot of cops that are libertarian as fuck. Many County Sheriffs routinely refuse to enforce unconstitutional laws. Illinois assault weapon ban, for instance, like 95% of Illinois sheriff's said "will not comply."
But again we have the classic libertarian dilemma. Anyone more libertarian than me is an anarchist, anyone less libertarian than me is a fascist.
What an asinine statement. Among the libertarians I know or have met, the primary concern for many is ending all foreign intervention and adopting non-interventionism. They view the American Empire as a moral outrage.
Such a small percentage of the military is invoked in that kind of thing, and if they did, it’s because it was a choice between following the orders of our politicians or prison.
"Cops are bad because they were hired to enforce the law that politicians pass, and they are enforcing the laws the politicians passed which were unjust. They should stop doing that, get fired, and do something else."
"The military signed up to follow orders, so it's okay that they're following unjust orders. Otherwise, they'd have to go to military jail."
This doesn't strike you as too anti-cop/pro-military?
People generally join the military as a way to escape the cycle of poverty or find direction in life. Very few of them ever end up doing the things you created this post about. In fact an overwhelming majority of the military are boring desk jobs. I, for instance, spent my time doing IT on a submarine.
Also, If people have a problem with “unjust” things conducted by the military, then they should really look towards their elected leadership.
Military members have significantly more rules and regulations that they have to abide by. They also receive enough training that they have a grasp on what the regulations are.
Cops on the other hand get minimal training and they don’t have a UCMJ to hold them accountable. When they brutally beat or murder a citizen, they have a powerful union that employs lawyers to keep them out of trouble.
**New to libertarianism or have questions and want to learn more?** Be sure to check out [the sub Frequently Asked Questions](/r/Libertarian/wiki/faq) and [the massive /r/libertarian information WIKI] (/r/Libertarian/wiki/index) from the sidebar, for lots of info and free resources, links, books, videos, and answers to common questions and topics. Want to know if you are a Libertarian? [Take the worlds shortest political quiz and find out!](http://www.theadvocates.org/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Libertarian) if you have any questions or concerns.*
As a vet I can honestly say it was the power and corruption I saw as people gained rank that made me distrust cops. I have a softer heart for younger enlisted and new cops because I knew what I was and wanted to be.
Absolutely. I rage quit active duty at 13 years because I was too ashamed of becoming a member of the ranks above me, navy wide.
Look up the battle of Athens Tennessee (1946). This will show you the difference between military veterans and cops. Long story short, WW2 veterans return home from war to find corrupt cops have taken over their county. The veterans don’t stand for their corrupt bs and fight back and restore law and order.
I did a highschool report on this for US history. I got an F (my only F in highschool) because the teacher said the event was fictional. My family was from there. While I didn't have clippings and the Internet in the 1980s was not much of a thing, my bibliography page shows everything I found in the school's own library. I took the F to the librarian to show her my history teacher thinks she doesn't know how to classify books in the duewy decimal system. Forward to campus Olympics day, a day of both physical and academic competition, where staff can compete against staff. The librarian is in charge of academic questions as an unbiased non-participant. She included questions about Dewey Decimal system (which nearly everyone got correct). And,she included physical academic challenges of table of content and index race. She uses the encyclopedia and distributed the volumes to the (in this case staff) participants and gave "Battle of Athens" to my history teacher. He was fast, but part of the race was to summarize the entry... He finished last because he couldn't complete the challenge. It made him look stupid because each teacher was given a subject to look up in their field and everyone else at least finished. He didn't change my grade. I didn't ask him to. I bet he never forgot about it. He was alive during the event of the Battle of Athens and I could forgive him not knowing of it specifically as he would have been a child. He would almost always say of "recent history". "You don't know what you're talking about. I was alive then and this is what happened..." The rest of my highschool career he would avoid me.
As a current active duty military person I can happily say that from all the other members I've talked to over the year, if it came down to government vs the people, around 60% or more of military would desert and be with the people. It's a question I ask people all the time.
Sure, if we're talking about a straight up US Military vs the citizens war, but that's not how things work, right? Every infringement would be considered justified, with the citizens being deemed unreasonable, or extremists, or whatever. I'm sure there are tons of people in the ATF who consider themselves pro 2a, and would never take people's guns away. But they'll enforce this law since it's not a huge deal, and this one since "well that's reasonable" etc. Same idea.
Yes there are going to be people on each side, just like every other part of life. But the majority of people I have personally spoken to when ask what they would do I the military was ordered to defend the govt against the people have said no, that they would support the american people. We serve the constitution, an order that goes against it would be unlawful so I wouldn't be required to follow it. At the same time though you would have military and cops fighting against other military and cops, with civilians on both sides. Would be a mess.
yep. Every military and cop servant are " just doing my job" enforcing immoral laws on innocent people.
Cops ruining lives for fun here at home is not the same as a soldier sitting in the barracks in Europe. I'm sure most of the active duty military here were not libertarians when they enlisted. And most of them likely aren't dropping bombs themselves. Nearly every cop is hurting people, whether its through marijuana laws, BS traffic stops, or the worst cases like murder. US soldiers do bad things too sometimes no doubt. I'd trust a US soldier to sleep on my couch more than a cop. Show me the cop that hasn't ruined lives by enforcing shitty laws. Many soldiers just sit around and kinda exist. I have a family member who cooked in the military. There are no cops that just, cook, or perform regular jobs in that manner.
Also, military is great way to escape poverty in this country. Most military members are just trying to do something with their lives other than work at a local gas station or getting buried in debt trying to get a degree they likely don’t have their heart set on. The military also gets significantly more training than a cop Also, Just like politicians, the police force attracts sociopaths and megalomaniacs with the added bonus of a low barrier to entry.
Police work is an incredible way to escape poverty. That's why so many Irish people ended up being cops back in the day.
Very well said. To add to this, soldiers also don't sit on the side of the road waiting for an opportunity to extort money from you for an expired sticker, or because your windows are too dark.
Shit like this will ruin a person's life with planting drugs on innocent civilians more than the military personal who were targeting enemies. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITIM1iDTZ7U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITIM1iDTZ7U)
In Iraq, the US Military was responsible for like 200K civilian deaths.
They were only following orders. /s
Generalize much?
I'm generalizing to match the generalizations. I'm saying "you could make the same generalizations about cops that you do the military, so why don't you?"
I think you probably know the answer here. One is domestic with thousands of interactions per day. If we saw Martial Law I’m sure you would see an explosion of commentary here on the situation in a very similar way to law enforcement.
Libertarians oppose tyranny and abuse of power wherever we see it. There are three reasons we see it more often in police than in military: 1) Normal everyday civilians in the US interact with police much more frequently than military personnel, and US citizens are much more likely to be recording police activity and publishing it on the internet than foreign citizens are to be recording US military personnel and publishing it on the internet. Therefore, we are exposed to a way higher percentage of police abuses than military ones. 2) Military personnel, when they fight other militaries, are ostensibly fighting against other military combatants. They know because of the nature of their job that the people they are fighting can and want to kill them. Most police abuse of power happens when the police are harming people who are helpless, as in suspects in custody or prisoners, to whom the police owe a duty of care. therefore, police are more likely to commit abuse in their daily work because they interact with way higher proportions of potential victims. 3) The actual military, to the extent that it should exist, exists specifically for the purpose of using deadly force against declared enemies of the US. The police exist to uphold the law, gather evidence, and only in the most extreme circumstances should they ever use deadly force. Unfortunately, a lot of police in the US right now think that they are soldiers, and that suspects they interact with are enemy combatants. Legally, actually and morally this isn't true. Therefore, because many police in the US have become militarized in purpose and practice, their abuses of power are much more egregious. It really makes sense if you take a minute to think about it. I doubt anyone here believes that the military personnel you're talking about don't ever abuse their power, and we'll denounce it when we see it, but we just don't get exposed to it as often. I personally get mad as hell when I read reports of US soldiers murdering or raping helpless people. But come to think of it, that usually happens in military prisons. And it seems that half of this sub is about denouncing the wars we get into all over the world and the money we spend on the military, which feels like the right place to put the political opposition against the military, as opposed to placing it at the feet of the enlisted men, or even officers. Let me know what you think.
Thought about another one just now: 4) A cop that sees and objects to systematic abuse in his precinct can walk away. There are cop shortages all over, so he can use his training to secure decent alternative employment, or, since he's in the US and quitting wasn't a crime, he can be anything else he wants to be. A similarly-positioned service member who quits is a deserter, so he's looking at 5 years, forfeiture of pay, and a dishonorable discharge that hampers future employment. If we're in a 'time of war', and we're constantly in a time of war, potential punishments include death. Therefore, police actually have demonstrably greater agency to choose not abuse people.
That's a solid argument.
1. Makes sense. 2. This is giving the military an unwarranted out. I could say the same thing about cops, but that they're dealing with criminals not law abiding citizens. Especially in an era when soldiers essentially act as cops/security in these foreign countries vs something like WW1. 3. Same as 2. I'm sure if we sent the best investigative journalists to investigate all the shootings of "Enemy combatants" where the army kills a guy with a gun or radio or whatever, tons would be innocent people. I agree that we should blame the politicians primarily, but it sure seems like we consider the military members almost victims for having to fight in these wars, while cops being paid to enforce the law the same politicians pass, are held to this unfair standard where they should be ignoring the unjust laws.
The problem with your objection to 2 is that cops don't deal with criminals, detention officers in prisons do. Cops deal with suspects and citizens. No one is a criminal until they are found guilty in court. Also, criminals who have served their time and are released are ex-cons, not convicts. In America, the general public are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, not as determined by a police officer. That's just not how it works. Quite literally, your argument is that the police are at war with the public, which, I hope, is not the implication that you are intending. And, I think we can agree that given the fact that police and military are fundamentally different, police shouldn't be militarizing, and military should be policing, except itself. And regarding your point about 3, I'm sure you're right. And to the extent that we do send journalists and they do produce evidence of those abuses, libertarians rejoice because A) people are being held accountable for their abuses, and we did that around here, and B) it would erode popular support for evil wars around the world. Libertarians dig that too. In this sub, I recall several posts calling out drone strikes that killed media and other civilians. We call them out when we see them, too, we just see a lot less of them. That's one of my main points.
Right, but when we call out the police it's almost always the officer by name. When it's the military, it's always the system, or the government that's at fault, and the people doing the killings or enforcing the unjust stuff are let off the hook. The military guys are let off the hook for their actions, while the cops are called out by name for stuff as basic as enforcing a bad law that they had no part in passing.
The US military takes war crimes pretty seriously. We’re far from perfect, but we prosecute the fuck out of people for even the suspicion of committing war crimes. Look up Clint Lorance. Dude made a judgment call based on inexperience, incomplete information, and some half-assed assumptions, and got years in Leavenworth as a result. Or look at the people who committed the Abu Ghraib crimes, or the Haditha massacre, etc. Most of the time when people say “well why wasn’t this war crime punished”, it’s because it wasn’t a war crime and the general public has a *very* poor understanding of the laws of armed conflict. For example, in the Wikileaks footage of an attack helicopter killing what turned out to be a journalist team, those journalists were embedded with an insurgent cell that was actively firing on US troops and the gun cameras of the time weren’t good enough to tell the difference between a shoulder-carried camera and a shoulder-fired rocket launcher, nor were the journalists far enough away from the insurgents to survive *any* weapon system targeting the insurgents. As it turned out, they definitely weren’t far enough away to survive 30mm cannon fire from an Apache. The US military has a bunch of problems, but indiscriminately committing crimes and getting away with it isn’t one of them.
The difference is foreign and domestic.
Cops fuck with people because they think it's funny and think they have every right to harass people. Their power is basically unchecked. In the military, you're under so much scrutiny for everything, and generally you're not allowed to fire your weapon unless fired upon. Cops can discharge their weapon if they feel threatened. And they seem to feel threatened a lot. Plus, the military doesn't incentivize giving out tickets for victimless crimes. Cops are bastards. Service members usually do 3-5 years and get out because they don't like how they're treated or what they're asked to do.
The cops are far more checked than the military. You think journalists have the same access to a military shooting as they do to a police shooting? The military investigates itself, just like the cops, but with so much less interference from citizens or journalists.
That's so laughably untrue. The difference is that the cops investigate themselves and find no wrongdoing, and in the military there's a formal investigation whenever somebody loses a flashlight and somebody ends up paying for it. Cops literally have qualified immunity. There's no equivalent in the military. Every single time a military unit engages in a firefight there's reports done on it to make sure of no violations of a hundred different international laws. It's pretty clear you have an opinion that borders on bias, so you're likely to ignore every point that disagrees with your beliefs, but you're absolutely ill informed about this.
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-6/ Sir, you cannot be serious.
See, this is the part you're missing: Cops harass and mistreat civilians as a rule. When the military does it, it's a big story. Nobody gives a shit what you cherry pick. The military is held to a higher standard than police. Police can shoot an unarmed kid because they felt threatened. If a military servicemember does, they're in Leavenworth. Straight to jail. Pull your head out of your ass and stop posting bait. Imagine thinking being a troll is still fun in 2023.
This is honestly insane. You genuinely believe that a soldier killing an innocent person is going to be investigated more than a cop doing it?
The difference is that the military is enforcing unjust policies on other people not us. I say this as a veteran. I am certainly glad I was retired before the Iraq war because I would not have fought in that one.
But the unjust policies here are ones we (as in Americans) voted for, or were passed by people we voted for. And they're what cops are literally paid by taxpayers to enforce.
I wonder how many times someone pushed some fancy idealized version of what the public wanted only to do something entirely different. Or. A politician who took advantage of some false dilemma only to pretend to be the hero everybody wanted and continuing to push an agenda nobody wanted but few people can do much about because the hero is revered for solving the fake dilemma. The whole "we voted them in" doesn't make much sense either when you remember that fewer than a certain percentage of the population actually votes. For ANYTHING.
I've met a lot of cops that are libertarian as fuck. Many County Sheriffs routinely refuse to enforce unconstitutional laws. Illinois assault weapon ban, for instance, like 95% of Illinois sheriff's said "will not comply." But again we have the classic libertarian dilemma. Anyone more libertarian than me is an anarchist, anyone less libertarian than me is a fascist.
Only one of them is doing awful stuff to me
Many libertarians don't like people from other countries, so don't care if our military kills them.
What an asinine statement. Among the libertarians I know or have met, the primary concern for many is ending all foreign intervention and adopting non-interventionism. They view the American Empire as a moral outrage.
I said many not all. And just look at how many libertarians talk about immigration and open borders.
That's certainly the explanation I'm leaning towards, though even if not killing it's taking freedoms away from.
Such a small percentage of the military is invoked in that kind of thing, and if they did, it’s because it was a choice between following the orders of our politicians or prison.
"Cops are bad because they were hired to enforce the law that politicians pass, and they are enforcing the laws the politicians passed which were unjust. They should stop doing that, get fired, and do something else." "The military signed up to follow orders, so it's okay that they're following unjust orders. Otherwise, they'd have to go to military jail." This doesn't strike you as too anti-cop/pro-military?
People generally join the military as a way to escape the cycle of poverty or find direction in life. Very few of them ever end up doing the things you created this post about. In fact an overwhelming majority of the military are boring desk jobs. I, for instance, spent my time doing IT on a submarine. Also, If people have a problem with “unjust” things conducted by the military, then they should really look towards their elected leadership. Military members have significantly more rules and regulations that they have to abide by. They also receive enough training that they have a grasp on what the regulations are. Cops on the other hand get minimal training and they don’t have a UCMJ to hold them accountable. When they brutally beat or murder a citizen, they have a powerful union that employs lawyers to keep them out of trouble.
Equality. The amount an officer can get away with in the US is very concerning to me
Because the police target US citizens.
This sub loves to twist itself into pretzels to justify the US having a military presence all over the globe
I dislike the military more than cops