213374U

May I suggest you dial back on the condescension (my feelings are being hurt by your insinuations that I'm ignorant and uneducated )? A more fruitful discussion would be had if, even if you are unwilling/unable to produce a complete dissertation expanding on your very interesting comments about structural racism, at least you gave a few references to literature, articles or even specific authors to start with, for those of us keen on learning more about how that actually works.

No. Police authority is rooted on and exists to preserve the monopoly on violence. This includes, but is not limited to, deadly force. Therefore, any commands issued by an agent of law enforcement carry implicit a threat of escalating force, up to deadly force. If you fail to put your hands on the wheel when ordered to, you will not be (immediately) shot in most cases. They will force you to comply with their commands by other, increasingly more violent means. If you keep on resisting, including physically standing up to their own use of force to enforce your compliance, probability of you being shot approaches 1. It should be obvious how this is fundamentally different from a teacher telling some kid to shut it or your boss telling you to come to his office.

My bad. You won't find anything searching for "58", because the actual quote is "in 42% of police-suspect encounters, no force was used", on page 300. Note that 58% includes a 37% of instances of verbal force. You may also want to read how a suspect is defined in the study. Any interaction resulting in the use of force automatically labels the subject a suspect, heh. If you want to get an idea about what constitutes an "interaction" for the purposes of the BJS data, scroll down, click on "Public-Police Contact Survey" and read one of the questionnaires. I recommend the 2008 one as the 2011 is a bit cluttered. Item 6 of the 2008 questionnaire specifically allows the subject to explain if they were threatened with force, or if actual physical force was used against them. I'm sorry, I mixed up the definitions — the other study I linked uses a "continuum of force" where force is divided into verbal commands (which carry an implicit threat of force), threats which are explicit, and actual physical force ranging from firm grip and pain compliance techniques all the way to strikes with external mechanisms. Note that data gathered covers only the last 12 months, and at any rate, only the last interaction in that period. If I'd completed my education I could tell you precisely how this skews numbers, but sadly, I never did. I'm guessing that, as a teacher, any threat implicit in your verbal coercion attempts amount to "comply or you will get detention", at worst. When dealing with law enforcement, the implicit threat is "comply or you may be KILLED". Not quite the same thing... I hope.

Right. How many interactions does the average person have with non-prescription painkillers throughout their life? How many interactions with cops? Sure, odds of dying in a car crash or a work-related accident may be much higher in absolute terms, but it just so happens that people drive to and from work every day. Whether a reported 1.4% of police-citizen interactions where force is involved (including verbal coercion) is too much is up for debate. At any rate, data is difficult to find and draw conclusions from, because in another study, the rate of interactions involving force was 58%, when instead of citizens in general, only police-suspect interactions are considered. I don't know of any meta-analyses that investigate the matter. Resisting, disrespecting or otherwise antagonizing cops seems to increase the odds that they will use force against you by a significant margin (~6 times more likely, from one report). That does not mean cops are thugs, or at least, data doesn't seem to support that assessment. At least, until we define what is a thug and how often does a thug resort to force in interactions with citizens.

Yep, because after they "see what it's like" they can go back and tell their pals all about it. Then they will understand it's barbaric and pointless and stop doing it, right? Does it bother you that human beings brutalize and kill each other, or only when they do it to someone you consider one of the "good guys"? Good thing they are devoted to "learning".

Mass Effect was Lawful Good - Rude Good so it doesn't really fit this discussion. Not many games do: you save the world regardless, just sometimes you're a jerk about it. Unless the 'Control' ending of ME3 secretly involved Shepard using the Reapers as his personal army to conquer the universe, I suppose. I do understand the perspective of your friend though, sometimes playing a jerk is actually harder than playing evil. Evil people presumably still have friends, things, places that they care about, yet in many games, it's expected that you be a jerk to everyone and not give a damn about anything, treat your party members badly, etcetera. This is nonsensical, but all too common a problem: the 'evil' option is really nothing more than Stupid Evil (or indeed Chaotic Stupid, or the elusive True Stupid). Still, the gentlemanly bandit archetype is a well-established trope so there's plenty of scope to play like that if a game allows it. Sometimes it's flat out impossible due to lazy scripting, e.g. magical karma systems where people automatically know what you do and react as such. No witnesses is no witnesses, dammit. Appropriately enough, one of my favourite Oglaf quotes (from "Abyss"): "Good and evil are relative, but being a **** cannot be allowed." One has to wonder why games are designed like that. It's a bit of narcissism on the players' part, I think. Roleplaying an evil bastard or the alternative should be its own reward, but it'd be unacceptable if the game world mostly dgaf about THE HERO's inclinations and past deeds, no matter how small, and there was no internal moral tracker. This way, petty evil actions become necessary in order to rack up enough points to be recognized as GOOD/EVIL by the world or boost the OOC metrics (because who wants to be a mediocre evil doer, anyway?). Personally I hate games that warn you about "karma lost!" and "influence gained!" because that invariably leads to me metagaming and deviating from the archetype I've created for my character. It came up recently in another thread that somebody was replaying ME2 and hated the morality system — I know I did. In fact, one of the worst decisions regarding NG+ was that your P/R gauge was reset to zero, which left you in a worse place than when importing a ME1 character. I just gave myself a ton of R/P points and went on to actually have fun roleplaying. The way SRR:Dragonfall handles it works much better for me. There is no good/evil in labels, actions simply have consequences. You *know* if what you've done is evil, but characters don't tremble in fear because you don't radiate an overwhelming aura of evil that the prince of darkness himself would be jealous of. And yet you may find that what seemed like the right thing to do at the time wasn't quite so further down the road, superficially exploring the difference between a deontological and a utilitarian approach to ethics. It's a more subtle way of doing things, and it conditions roleplaying and gameplay less. Good and evil are social constructs and society as a whole isn't big on letting openly evil people run around doing their thing. Those who are successful at being evil invariably hide it behind a façade of respectability, or normality at the very least. In addition, a good/evil divide isn't really reflective of what happens in the real world, where legitimacy and legality are often much more important than moral good or evil, but this is simply overlooked in games, or confused. One can be a law-abiding citizen and be seriously evil, because the moral compass of the society they live in is totally messed up. Unless games shift focus from being EPIC!!!1 to exploring actual character motivations, interactions and development, we will never have depictions of good and evil that aren't caricaturesque. Would something like Crime and Punishment even work in this medium?

Good to know, thanks. I'll have to check it out, when I have time. Playing in anything less than full realism feels like choosing easy mode, though. My manhood feels threatened.

OZ, the game. Could be interesting actually. Lots of "factions" of different morals and goals, narrative and reactivity heavy, controversial topics, lots of potential for different skills and stats beyond just combat. I'd pledge a few bucks for that. A prison or just general underworld/crime RPG would be a breath of fresh air for sure, and it has potential. I'm not sure it'd work in practice though — I love AP to bits but it wasn't as well received as I'd have liked.

That looks fantastic. I'm sort of jelly of people who can put in the hours to learn those sims. Last one I played is IL-2 and just learning to take off and land in full realism was... hell, I don't think I even learned that properly.

Look, I know that as an Euro, I can go "sit and spin*". But... We used to have something similar over here. It was routinely abused to execute "fleeing" prisoners, political undesirables, union members, etc. How the hell is that even supervised? Doesn't that kinda go against due process and presumption of innocence? I don't even... *just tried it. Nothing happened. I must be doing someting wrong. Post a tutorial video perhaps? Sorry to hear that. You have my sincere respect. The work of teachers is as important as it is underrated. A sad state of affairs.

"I never said that I will do anything else than shoot"... but you did, in the previous paragraph, and in not one but two posts before. Shooting at someone until they no longer immediately threaten you is not the same as killing or permanently incapacitating. And the lesson I recounted regarding firearms training was meant to make me consider the full scope of the possible consequences of pulling a gun, not just the likely or even necessary consequences. Treating the former as the latter is inteded to give pause to someone who bears arms if and when the impulse to draw one arises. Killing someone is kind of a big deal, y'know? Big enough that even the possibility should be considered carefully. My stand is exactly as Woldan explained. If I see myself in a situation where myself or someone else is threatened with deadly force* and I carry a gun (which I don't), I pull it and shoot until the immediate threat passes, not until the attacker is dead. Despite what you may have been led to believe, people tend to go down *before* they die, when fired at. Other than that... I think it's time for me to come clean. You have finally unmasked me. Woldan is indeed an alt of mine, and I'm part of a conspiracy of knife-carrying forum users out to get you. Please don't kill us! I mean... me. *in my particular jurisdiction, force employed in self-defense must be "proportional" to the threat, so simply being in danger of being injured doesn't justify retaliating with deadly force. I could not, for instance, lawfully repel an aggression from Woldan, if he were charging at me unarmed, with a firearm, because even though he completely outweighs me and could probably break my neck if he wished (would that count as suicide, I wonder), it's not a very likely outcome. It's a very ambiguous rule which is neither here nor there because this thread is about 'Murica. But you asked.... What?

I don't need to show you any such cases because that's not what you originally stated. Going back just one page: (emphasis mine) You were talking specifically about ending the aggressor's life. Not dissuading, not stopping, not dropping. Killing. You are now shifting your position, which is a good thing, I suppose. Just don't pretend that you said something else earlier. If it's hard to find an example of what you are asking it's most likely because police officers don't walk up to and kill assailants execution-style once they are down. Which is just about the only way to prove the "killing intent" you were describing earlier. I'm not contradicting anything. When you pull a gun you must be fully aware that doing so may result in the death of the person facing the business end, statistics notwithstanding. This does not mean you intend to *kill* them, only that it's a very real possibility of this particular use of force to end an imminent threat. And given the serious consequences of that outcome, you must only do so when you are absolutely sure that it is warranted.

I dunno, I thought it made sense when I played it.

Wrong. You shoot until you are safe. Anything else is secondary. You shoot until the *imminent* threat to your or someone else's life is stopped. That may result in the attacker's death, but resorting to deadly force at the drop of a hat and beyond the immediate protection of your own or someone else's life will land you in jail. Remember that aggressors also have rights, even if they are acting unlawfully. As far as I know, the law generally doesn't permit you to arrogate for yourself the right to kill someone (except perhaps for soldiers in combat), though death may be an unfortunate consequence of the use of force in self-defense. Using force with the intent to "permanently incapacitate" (i.e. kill) is murder. We have some actual lawyers and prosecutors here so perhaps one of them can explain it better and share some experience with actual deadly force cases. In all fairness, you don't "shoot to incapacitate", as far as I'm aware. When I was trained to use firearms, both in the military and as a bodyguard, it was made very clear to me that I should never draw a gun and point it at somebody unless I was prepared to and justified in killing that person. Not threaten, not incapacitate, not grievously injure, but kill. Not because killing the target was the goal, but because as a firearm is by its very nature deadly, death is a likely outcome, and therefore resorting to it must not be trivialized. The bottom line is that firearms are good for killing — under what circumstances killing is and ought to be a part of law enforcement are different issues. In this particular case, it's hard to judge. Personally, I'd hope that if a teenage daughter of mine, deranged or no, threatened someone with a knife, attempts would be made to resolve the situation without deadly force. Again, without details, it's all pure conjecture.

Yeah, that's a poor choice of words at best. If cops in the US are really trained to put down a mentally unstable teenager like a rabid dog, training needs to be reviewed. Especially after said training failed to prevent an escalation and also failed to resolve the situation in a non-lethal way, when the first cop for whatever reason could not or chose not to restrain her after having her face down on the ground. Cops going into full CYA mode at the first sign of trouble is par for the course though, so it's barely worthy of comment.

I find it sorta funny that the guy that is drawing the most flak for this is the only one in the whole community that posted pics of his (smoking hot) wife. That's the internets for you, I guess.

To be fair, neither these nor war/politics etc threads are appropriate for a video game dev message board, and WoT is something of a rarity. Me, I'm thankful we have a sandbox at all. There have been attempts through the years at creating parallel communities not subject to the same rules of moderation (TADS, Tarna's), but they have mostly failed AFAIK. One has to wonder why. I, too, am bewildered when people consider the human form inappropriate or offensive (let alone more offensive than the glorification of violence), but you aren't going to change centuries of religious conditioning with a few forum threads.

What should we be doing differently? Try tax resistance. Chomsky has spoken about this and organized it in the past. It's simple, really. The state simply cannot function without money from our taxes and it's a perfectly legitimate* way for people to force policy change when policy is both morally repugnant and illegal. That however puts us personally at risk (fines, incarceration) so we are naturally less inclined to do it. So... we'll stick to nodding sagely over our lattes and self-righteously wag our fingers at Russia, Iran, "terrorists", etc. I was thinking of adding "until some disenfranchised naturalized Muslim puts a bullet in our brain", but that's not likely to happen, so I'll close the sentence with "until we choke on a butter croissant and die". As for convincing... how is that Chomsky's job? He just talks about stuff. It's your civic duty to remain informed and form your own opinions. There is plenty of information about cold hard facts out there, you don't need Chomsky for that. As an aside, I'd appreciate if you guys didn't do Bruce's work for him. It's much more entertaining to see him come up with ever more ridiculous applications of his double standards to justify the atrocity of the day than just see him get behind something someone else said. *of course, only if you succeed. If you don't, it was never legitimate and you are a seditious rebel, an anarchist, an anti-social element or what have you.

"Terrorist" is not an internationally recognized legal definition for a person, for good or ill. You're a national or foreign citizen and either a combatant or a non-combatant. Someone breaching or intent on breaching the Convention (or any law, really) does not justify ignoring the law right back as punishment or in order to prevent alleged "terrorism", and the act does not forfeit the rights of the person commiting the violations. That's due process and it's kind of a big deal, for us smug Westerners at least.

Enemy combatants still have rights. I trust you know this? And yeah, it's always a good idea to start allowing the man to decide whose rights can be waived and under which circumstances. Because that has never led to bad things in the past. It's not like they try and do it under the table already, so what harm could it possibly do if it was done openly? What a dreadful world you must live in, where man is so violent that he must be prevented by governments from doing evil.

Apparently, the guy in the Jewish deli disagreed with that assessment. "Every time, they try to make you think Muslims are terrorists. I was born in France. If they hadn't been attacked elsewhere I wouldn't be here." At this point, I don't expect anyone to take anything at face value, but there's that.

Seriously, how long have you been waiting for an opportunity to use that line? Protip: