I should have left a tone indicator! I meant “following orders (derisive).”
B/c I agree with you: I assume most think they’re doing the right thing, or they’d be in a different line of work.
So where are the ones who go into this because they genuinely want to protect others? We can't pretend they don't exist, just like we can't pretend that good politicians who genuinely believe in liberty don't, but why are evil people the majority?
i don't think they could live with themselves if they didn't. i wanted to be a cop when i was much younger. then i worked with cops and realized they're monsters in a blue uniform
In my city 2 years ago we faced off against Maple MAGAs. The police separated the 2 groups. The Maple MAGAs busted through the police barricade & not only did the police let them, they pushed US out of the way to allow the Maple MAGAs to surround us.
They are prevented from thinking and/or question. In Brazil it is worse, because many are not very far away socially, a cursed legacy of the colonial period.
Cops are the stupid bullies you remember from high school elevated to respectability by the system's need for bully-boys. They're sucked off for it by mass media that valorizes what they do. These fucks all think they're heroes.
There’s a huge problem w/selection bias in policing. It hires those who lean authoritarian (if not overtly bullies), and there’s the “training” & culture instructing them to think in “us vs them” terms, and to escalate rather than de-escalate. Hiring DOES discriminate against high intelligence.
people of “high” intelligence/education can be biased and awful, too, though…. i’m not sure that hiring discrimination based on IQ (itself an racist, classist, ableist, western-centric metric) matters that much in this case.
Honestly I don't think anyone particularly smart would want to be a cop anyway unless they feel like they have no choice. It's a shitty dangerous job, and it's more used in upholding authoritarian systems that anyone with half a brain can see are societal cancer than to actually protect people.
Honestly, that's a good point--even ignoring all the massive societal and structural issues being part of the police entails, it's ultimately a job where you are pretty much *always* only dealing with people at their absolute worst. Why subject yourself to that if you can avoid it?
I joined the military straight out of school; only reason I did was I grew up in a poor working class family in rural area. When I got out on medical discharge I had opportunity to go university, and I wish I'd been able to do that from the start. Military/police enlistment is an act of desperation.
I agree. I cited it because of people asking about intelligence and because there’s a known lawsuit where a judge decided a police force was allowed to discriminate against supposed high IQ individuals.
