Minor contra point. Many police in the UK do not carry guns on their person. They have access to guns and the state monopoly on violence is very one-sided in favour of the state, but community-policing and disarmament of the first-contact-point is absolutely something that can and (sometimes) does happen when the societal level of gun violence is low enough.

My street is finally getting fiberoptic internet! That means I’m going from around 4MiB/s to at least 400 more likely 600 MiB/s… with around 3/4 of that in upload speed. I have already canceled all my streaming services and external servers, the parts for my homeserver are on their way.

No more Google Drive, hello Nextcloud, no more Spotify, hello Finamp, no more Netflix and Crunchyroll, hello Jellyfin, no more Bitwarden, hello Vaultwarden.

I’ll finally be able to self-host all my Docker containers fir my website-, email- and game-server, I can have a homeserver for my media-streaming even when I’m not at home. I might even create my own Immich and Lemmy Instances. Just need to read up on NixOS and get a good, reliable system running.

Fuck big Tech, I’ll host my own shit and offer it to all my friends.

Get a crystal growing kit and grow colourful crystals with her. It’s gonna take multiple days and is a great entry to stem-topics.

I’ve seen the boys restroom, the janitor who has to take care of that deserves every cent.

“Boys will be boys.”

Fuck you Tom! That’s how you react to your brat violating the bodily autonomy of another human beeing!? Hearing you say that means he feels it’s normal, he’s got permission and that it’s good masculine behavior. You’re teaching your son to be an asshole instead of a functioning human being. Boys will behave better if we teach them to, so you better pick up the slack and join the rest of us in raising your fucking child!

Vaako

Judge Dredd

Emperor Cheesar accepting gold tribute from his feudal vassal

I have never had more and safer passwords without any hassle, than since using Vaultwarden as a passwordsafe (there are many instances offerd without cost) in combination with Bitwarden extension in my browsers and the app on my phone.

It’s so incredibly easy to use.

Friendly* Fascism puts a cute and / or attractive face on dystopian shit, then wraps it in the flag and salutes.

Works great.

*: Not actually friendly

https://youtu.be/CA_E_pkbqBo

Yes. Until the VAST majority of Polizei intervene against police violence when it happens and LOUDLY DEMAND the prosecution of police violence, THEY ARE THE ENEMY.

Every. Last. One.

There was a moral panic in the 19th century where people were outraged that young girls from good families kept reading novels. They said it would lead to social self-isolation and bookishness and distract from apropriate activities like knitting, socialising, looking pretty and smiling.

And young women were thought to be largely unable to discern fact from fiction and hold their gentlemen callers to the same standards as the men in their novels. And you know, women having standards… the 18th century couldn’t have that.

Wtf? They couldn’t survive? The fukken Nanuqsaurus was a tyrannosaurid living in boreal Alaska. Dinosaurs lived in extremely cold climates and thrived there.

I mean… aren’t all tetrapods just fish with time added?

The problem is not with individual cops, I know a lot of really good cops, first among them my aunt who always fought to keep the institution responsible and upright by investigating cases of police misconduct and for that she was threatened and ostracised.

The problem is that the institution politically is largely opposed to checks and regulations regarding their members. Prosecutors drop charges of police violence if any investigation takes place at all (only 2% will arrive at a charge). And if it comes to a trial, policemen form the ol’ “Wall Of Silence” (also the case of Oury Jalloh)

Amnesty International says:

“Leider gibt es viele Einzelfälle, bei denen die Ermittlungen […] unbefriedigend bleiben”

At what point do “many individual cases” stop being individual cases?

Slesvig and Lower Saxony being model police forces doesn’t take away the problems with hamburgian, saxon, north rhine westphalian, hessian, baden wurtembergian and bavarian forces.

The GDP fighting fascism in the police is a good thing, but the unions resisting the establishment of independent investigators is not.

Other countries have a much more transparent handling of their cases of police violence and our german police institutions are lobbying hard to keep those regulations away in our country.

This opposition to control and regulation is a HUGE problem, especially when the people holding the states monopoly on violence are forming an esprit de corps that prevents individual good cops from blowing the whistle on bad behaviors.

I would urge you to look into the KivAPol research project: https://kviapol.uni-frankfurt.de/

I love Tom Hardy, but dark gods he’s impossible to understand half of the time.

Yes, because my immediate surroundings used to be chock full of cops. My uncle and aunt as well as my neighbors and best friends parents growing up all were or still are Polizei, I had the opportunity to spend much of my time in the household of a criminal investigator and a trainer of the North Rhine Westphalian riot police, I lived next door and visited my cousins in the house of an internal affairs officer and a “normal” police officer. As a kid I had the opportunity to sit in and shoot a water cannon they use to dispere riots and every time there was a party in the cul-de-sac, I got to listen to the cops talk to each other and listened not only to what they said but how they said it, what they argued about and how it changed over the years. I grew up in those group dynamics, I heard the esprit de corps directly from them. And it informed my political leanings to a big degree.

None of them were bad cops, but all of them served a broken system that changed their attitude to the worse. Worse even, when my aunt did her job in the LKA Dezernat internal affairs when the migrant crisis started and there was a noticable step to the right on the side of the Polizei, she got ostracised and (subtly) threatened.

Then of course there are studies and statistics, 2024 had more people shot by the police than every other year since 1999 and illegal police violence is substantially more often directed against leftist, poor people and migrants or asylum seekers.

ACAB is a condemnation of a police system that is in large parts not working correctly and more importantly, suffers from targeted infiltration by the far-right. There are multiple reports of AfD and independent far-right activists calling for their allies to infiltrate the ranks of military and police to use the power of the state to further their political goals and mold the esprit de corps towards a desired anti-democratic bend. We COULD create laws to keep the worst of this in check, but the lobbying by DPolG and various politicans keeps that from happening… and as long as the keepers of the nations violence are not under stricter control and oversight, the entire institution and thus all cops will remain bastards.

While “Die Polizei” as an institution is not AS bad as the US equivalent (and honestly, that would be quite a high bar), the institutional group-dynamics are strongly moving in the same direction and have attracted a (not really) suprising amount of authoritarian conservative or right-out right-wing people into their ranks, strengthening an inherent institutional anti-left, anti-immigrant and anti-poor bias.

It’s not quite the same issue as in the US, (for example our Polizei get a great education in de-escalation and handling people without the use of force) but the institutionalized sentiments are increasingly dangerous and problematic.

Or “eine Reihe bedauerlicher Einzelfälle”

THE FLESH OF FALLEN ANGELS!