this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 153 points 9 months ago (20 children)

Yeah, no, fuck all cops. And please lets not pretend like shit isn't getting mighty fasc-y all over Europe too..

https://www.enainstitute.org/en/publication/mark-neocleous-capitalism-was-created-by-the-police-power-interview-at-ena-institute/

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (8 children)

ALL cops you say?

I have many friends and family who have joined the Scottish Police and given years of their lives to serving their communities, risking their own lives and health. Should I say fuck them too?

I joined the police for six months before deciding it wasn’t the career for me and got back into charity work. Are you saying Fuck Me now or just for the six months I was in? Did my fuckery expire?

How can thousands, millions of people doing a job be reduced to such a binary sentiment.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 9 months ago (21 children)

How can thousands, millions of people doing a job be reduced to such a binary statement

The reason why most people (including myself) say ACAB is because of the system of policing, not the merits of any given police officer. Systems are inflexible and adverse to change. Individual good cops can exist, but once again, the system itself is the problem. A good cop can never fix the system, nor could a hundred, or a thousand. A million could, at best, give the illusion of a good system. People often say a rotten apple spoils the bunch, and I think that looking at policing from the perspective of individual rotten cops, or rotten cops “spoiling the bunch” is problematic when the system itself is rotten. And for participating in the system, yes, all cops are bastards.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (16 children)

ALL cops you say?

While acab is probably too generalized a term to apply to ALL police forces in the world..... Interpreting acab in absolutes is also kinda silly and needlessly pedantic.

If I were to say all Nazi are bastards...... Would we be making the same arguments? Surely there were Nazi that were forced to join the party, surely there were Nazi giving years of their lives to serving their communities, risking their lives and health.

The point of ACAB is to highlight the inherent and institutional failures of policing actions native to the vast majority of western democracies. Where police are primarily utilized to protect property and institutional power, rather than protecting the most disadvantaged communities in our society.

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[–] [email protected] 145 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I'm from germany and I'm scared about the future. The far-right is getting more and more voters. It's not just the USA who is fckd.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Thanks for sharing our pain. I don’t understand how people pretend that Europe isn’t going thru the same stuff like we are in the US.

Inflation, migration debates, cost of living crises, rise of authoritarianism, income inequality, all of this is and has been global. Some places affected more than others depending on what you look at.

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[–] dudinax 124 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Also Europe:

"Let's do this obviously good thing for the sake of the whole continent."

"No, because it would help France."

[–] verstra 28 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Haha sounds about right!

Is this based on actual event or is it a general joke?

[–] dudinax 16 points 9 months ago

A quote I heard from a Greek minister (from memory). "If Germany had a choice between doing the right thing and hurting France, they will hurt France."

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Let's not forget brexit. Americans aren't alone in their dumbassarry

[–] [email protected] 61 points 9 months ago (13 children)

Or the recent wins of fascist parties in Europe.

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[–] [email protected] 79 points 9 months ago (3 children)

i hate these memes that group entire countries or continents into one homogeneous blob and assumes that one is inherently better than the other

[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's the best way to sow division. Put everyone into discrete groups and tell them that the other groups are bad.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yep. I can remember not too long ago that French police blinded people when dealing with the yellow jacket riots. Also the president's bodyguard being there dressed as a cop and hospitalised someone instead of protecting the president. There's also the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK and every year here there's multiple cops charged with raping women or using excessive force against a minority.

Cops are shit everywhere.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 9 months ago (1 children)

France burns down annually hahaha

[–] [email protected] 62 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Not sure about you, but I'll take workers reminding everyone who is in charge and how democracy works over cops constantly shooting the innocent - people, dogs, whatever, and generally carrying on like thugs.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Lol as if all of Europe has no problems of their own.

Like, yeah, I'm American and shit is really fucked up here in some specific ways... But let's not pretend Europe is some sort of utopia.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Certified European here, can confirm individual member states and EU as a whole as not being a utopia.

Especially us Dutch folks who have been fucked over and held hostage by a waaay to large upper middle class for years. To the point where we've managed to abolish the ministry of housing, open up the housing market to foreign investors, replace a functioning healthcare system with a healthcare market where insurance firms rule with an iron fist and demand more bureacracy than actual care being provided.

... and the list goes on.

It's a worldwide symptom of economic unequality and the decrease in social skills stemming from the fact that we live our lives increasingly isolated in our own online social bubbles. We're turning increasingly hostile towards each other because we're no longer confronted with all people and perspectives in our surroundings, but just the ones we like.

The United States, being a large country filled with very diverse people, despite all being taught to "love America", still deals with Nebraskan farmers having wildly different wants and needs, and way different social standards than the Californian yuppies.

You're a large country, with 334 million people spread out over a vast amount of land. Meanwhile, we're 18 million living on a patch of marshy land roughly 3/4th the size of West Virgina, and we're further from being united than ever before. The fact that you're even holding together as a country is nothing short of amazing considering the fact that your political systems probably cause way more chaos than ours do.

A lot of Europeans probably mean it when they say "How are you even a country?". And it's not so much an attack on the American people as a whole (though some of y'all deserve to be made fun of), but geniuine amazement at the fact that it has more or less held together since 1776.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You gotta give credit to the fact that in the time the United States has had it's 1 republic, France has had 5 of them.

Or the fact that Europe tears itself apart like every 50 years

[–] [email protected] 50 points 9 months ago (10 children)

It's probably because French citizens are smart enough to put their own well-being before their governing powers well-being.

Yeah we've been together for 200 years, but it's not going well at all.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (9 children)

In most European countries you need a 4 year university degree in criminology to become a cop. They have the same standards for average police officers as we in North America have for Federal law enforcement. So while it's certainly true that some European countries have shitty cops, the ones with stricter barriers to entry have slightly less shitty cops.

Here's an interactive map although it does seem to be missing a fair bit of data for Europe. The USA has the most abysmal Police training time at just 500 hours of training between being a civilian and being a Police officer.

edit: lol whoops I never actually posted the link earlier. Here it is: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-training-requirements-by-country

[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago (9 children)

between being a civilian and being a Police officer

Also, in Europe, police are considered to be a part of civilian society. Here, "civilian" means "not part of the military". Police officers are civilians.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Guy's, let's put aside our minor differences and remember - fuck Russia.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 9 months ago

Pretty bold for a region that can't last more than a generation or two before devolving into a police state so severe that it plunges the entire globe into armed conflict.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago (1 children)

"How the fuck have they lasted this long as a country?"

Applies to Belgium far more than the US.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

We're younger than the US though.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

We got nukes first and WW2 barely touched us. That's about it. We started the game in the easiest mode.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

It was the same with the original development of the country.

The difference is apparent when compared to Canada.

In Canada the pioneers were led or joined by the police, the newly created Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Law and order arrived either before or with the new pioneers.

In the US, it was the other way around. Pioneers went west without any officials, police or law enforcement. Pioneers dealt with everything by the force of a gun. Whoever had a gun was the one with power and controlled everything ..... you could be a good moral person and lead a community or you could be a gang leader, decrepit, immoral and unjust, as long as you had a gun, you could do whatever you wanted.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago

French cops are perfectly normal, just don’t google “ici on noie les Algériens” and why it keeps being graffitied on a specific bridge in Paris.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What, you think acab vs notallcops is a usa thing ?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (5 children)

It's not a thing where I live. There's going to be other countries where the police operate like a gang, but it's just not the case in almost all OECD countries. In authoritarian states like Russia and Iran, sure, but in functional democracies, it's just not the case. The USA is a big exception, it must be part of that american exceptionalism thing.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

Oi you got a loicense for this meme?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Fuck this dumb inferiority-complex-having bullshit

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