The police seem free enough, perhaps it's their land. A state of their own, even.

Even if the US only incarcerated rapists and murderers, we would still incarcerate more than Germany. It's not so simple as you're implying.

Perhaps. That would imply several times more rapists and murderers per capita than Germany (to match the 10x incarceration rate).

Still, why call it "land of the free" then? "Land of the most rapists and murderers per capita (or close)" or "Broken society" sounds more apt!

But I'm pretty sure the BS "marijuana laws" and other such incarceration reasons that wouldn't even exist in Germany, are a big part (at least until recently, not sure today) of the disparity.

> As of 2016, 2.3 million people were incarcerated in the United States, at a rate of 698 people per 100,000.

Germany is around 70 per 100000.

You were saying?

I was saying "Even if the US only incarcerated rapists and murderers"

I went looking for data to refute this, because it didn't seem right to me. But, looks like you're correct here.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics [0], among all state-level prisoners, 14.3% of them are in for murder, and 13.1% are in for rape. That's 27.4% for the combination, or about 350,000 inmates. 106 per 100,000.

If you add in Federal prisoners, the inmate count goes to ~370,000, or about 112/100k

[0] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p18.pdf (PDF, see table 13, page 21.)

Thanks for contributing the stats! I appreciate it.

Can people be counted in both categories?

No. Those stats are exclusive counts. For the most serious offense only. So inmates who raped and murdered their victim are tallied under the “murder” column.

Actually it's not contradictory at all, it makes sense.

Whenever I visit America I'm astonished at how outrageous and uncivil some people behave. They really do want to press their freedom against the rights of others.

Carrying guns is the best example - it's an obvious 'freedom' that massively complicated policing and everything else.

Police in the US are rightly very afraid when pulling over someone for something petty like speeding because that person could be upset and have a gun. Where I'm from cops are not afraid because nobody has guns.

The woman who defied 'stay at home orders' - how do you deal with that as a cop? She just wants to cut hair to make money to stay alive, but you have to arrest her, which could lead to a confrontation with her and her 'supporters with guns'.

An ideology of 'land of the free' will necessarily have excessive conflict at the margins where said freedoms interdict with the ostensible freedoms of others and you have law enforcement in the middle trying to sort it out in sometimes ambiguous situations.

> Police in the US are rightly very afraid when pulling over someone for something petty like speeding because that person could be upset and have a gun. Where I'm from cops are not afraid because nobody has guns.

this sort of begs the question of why direct, in-person confrontation is even necessary for petty offenses. there's always a risk that such an interaction could go south, whether or not guns are involved. to write a ticket, all the cop has to do is record the measured speed and identify the vehicle and driver. with the tools available in 2020, they should be able to do this without stopping the person to ask for their license and registration. save the confrontations and arrests for when the person clearly poses an imminent threat to those around them.

> with the tools available in 2020, they should be able to do this without stopping the person to ask for their license and registration.

What tools would those be? Specifically how do you positively identify the driver without checking their ID?

You make the owner responsible. I.e. if the driver can be identified (or the owner identifies the driver) then you can fine the driver, otherwise you fine the owner.

take a picture of the driver and compare against ID photos later? for most vehicles, the set of possible drivers on a particular day is not large. it doesn't have to be perfect, just enough to make the charge stick a good chunk of the time.

Civilized people have absolutely no problem getting pulled over for speeding or whatever. It works just fine in almost every civilized country.

This is a question of basic civic virtue, not laws, policy or operating procedure.

The cops are only afraid when minorities own guns. See the Mulliford Act in California signed by Reagan when he was governor with the full backing of the NRA.

More recently see the White people who fully armed marched on the capital in Michigan, yelled at police and they did nothing.

Would you propose banning knives too, so police don't have to be worried about pulling over someone with a knife?

Police are the biggest cowards indeed.

> Police in the US are rightly very afraid when pulling over someone for something petty like speeding because that person could be upset and have a gun. Where I'm from cops are not afraid because nobody has guns.

They aren't actually scared. Publicly, they might talk about how stressful their jobs are etc. etc., but speak privately with one who is comfortable with you and you'll discover they are not scared in the slightest. They know everyone has their back and that they aren't really in any danger.

> "land of the free"

That just means we're legally afforded more individual liberties than most (if not all) other countries.

Most "western" nations provide roughly the same legal rights to their citizens.

There's some variance, but there's also a large amount of variance in laws between states within the USA.

There's no country in the world that provides, to the same degree as the USA, extraordinarily broad freedom of speech (and association) and the right to keep and bear arms.

And, to the extent that citizens of other "western" nations enjoy legal rights typical of republican democracies, it's because the US set the trend in the 18th century. At that time, the concept of a creedal nation obtaining its legitimacy from a governing document, in it providing checks & balances to limit the power of government, along with a bill of rights that guarantee broad protection of rights pertaining to speech, bearing arms, impartial trial, privacy (searches and seizures) — was truly unique to the US. That it is now commonplace in the West is a testament to one of America's many lasting contributions to the world.

Just because you did it first, doesn’t mean you did it best. There are so many things in the US that have previously or currently systematically denied liberty to large subsets of americans - but I guess you can publicly advocate for violence against specific groups of people, which you can’t do in many other countries, so you win there! :P

Since I know that someone is going to reply “like what?!?” here’s an example I recently learned about: it wasn’t until 1963 that public defenders were widely available as a result of a supreme court ruling. So equal protection under the law was clearly not available before 1963. We all know the rich Can afford better defense to this day, but can you call it justice if you don’t even get a lawyer?

Contemporary example: drive west from el paso for an hour or so, today. Well, not today, but when it’s safe to travel. The border patrol checkpoint along i-10 will check your papers if you’re visibly latinx. Freedom!

Yes, it is entirely possible for multiple things to be true at the same time.

1) the US has unique protections of individual liberties (free speech, associations, arms)

2) the US has systematic repression of certain minorities, especially among the police (the vast majority of which is illegal and just inadequately prosecuted)

> Since I know that someone is going to reply “like what?!?” here’s an example I recently learned about: it wasn’t until 1963 that public defenders were widely available as a result of a supreme court ruling. So equal protection under the law was clearly not available before 1963. We all know the rich Can afford better defense to this day, but can you call it justice if you don’t even get a lawyer?

Right, at the risk of diving into a rabbit-hole of negative vs positive freedoms — the US was never ever the land of positive freedom. It has always been the land of negative freedom, and uniquely so. You can dislike the implications of that all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that the US truly is the land of negative freedom — and that's not a normative statement.

Being attacked by a court runs directly contrary to negative freedom though. And with a single systematic infringement of negative freedom, the overarching ideal has been lost due to the contradiction of needing to respond by engaging with a system that requires you to jump through arbitrary "voluntary" hoops.

Sure, but there is no country in the world that satisfies the platonic ideal, in which you are totally immune to attack by the court.

No country on the planet is absolutely free. The US just happens to be the most negatively free country.

If you're trying to do justice to the concept of negative freedom, then what definition are you using? To me, it's about being free to be left alone and go your own way, as opposed to being provided for (eg freedom from hunger, or whatever).

I would classify a public defender as a mitigation of an impingement on negative freedom rather than a bona fide positive freedom. There are surely other countries where you have less of a chance of being harmed by the courts, because they compensate for their general infringement of freedom by giving you better protections to defend yourself from it.

> The US just happens to be the most negatively free country.

The US has some of the most draconian copyright laws in the world. Are those outweighed by something else, or should we dispense with this notion of "most" ?

> If you're trying to do justice to the concept of negative freedom, then what definition are you using? To me, it's about being free to be left alone and go your own way, as opposed to being provided for (eg freedom from hunger, or whatever).

Yes, and for most people in America, this is unquestionably the case.

> I would classify a public defender as a mitigation of an impingement on negative freedom rather than a bona fide positive freedom. There are surely other countries where you have less of a chance of being harmed by the courts, because they compensate for their general infringement of freedom by giving you better protections to defend yourself from it.

It's debatable that the US public defender system somehow mitigates this impingement less effectively than any other Western country, indeed most western countries have similar public defender systems.

For the sake of argument, even if we were to accept that premise...the majority of Americans spend far more of their lives exercising the uniquely strong negative liberties extended to them than interfacing with the one aspect of American life in which a globally uniform impingement of negative rights is allegedly mitigated the least.

> The US has some of the most draconian copyright laws in the world. Are those outweighed by something else, or should we dispense with this notion of "most" ?

The US's copyright laws are on par with those in most of the Western world. All EU countries are signatories of the Berne Convention, and the copyright length in the US is the same as it is in France, Singapore, Switzerland, South Korea, Italy, UK, Australia, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark...

> Yes, and for most people in America, this is unquestionably the case.

Maybe you should start questioning it. AFAICT, people in other developed countries enjoy comparable day to day freedoms.

> It's debatable that the US public defender system somehow mitigates this impingement less effectively than any other Western country

The original argument you engaged with was about a complete lack of public defenders in the past.

> The US's copyright laws are on par with those in most of the Western world

Empirically this is not true - eg most VPN providers prohibit torrenting on US exit nodes. And international copyright infringement inducers (eg Kim Dotcom) aren't prosecuted strongly in their own countries, but rather extradited to the US.

Overall, this refrain of "freedom" is actually blinding and counterproductive. And this doesn't change when it's limited to "negative freedom". Unquestioning assertions of "We're #1" erode our rights - detailed critiques preserve them.

Just stop. This guy has already made up his mind that the US is one of the worst countries in the world.

"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."

If you don't seem to react to the content of outside information and if we know what you're going to say before you say it, you're not thinking independently, you're just buying into someone else's beliefs.

I don't see how it's remotely possible to form that conclusion based on the mere two comments I said before yours. What specifically from my second comment was so predictable?

Which other countries? Most other western European countries are free-er and even have better press, and much less (to almost none) religiously motivated BS and puritanism...

Heck, for a while people weren't even allowed to ...drink alcohol...

Because ultimately people in the USA who aren't oppressed don't even notice or have to care that other people are being oppressed. Then they are given various -isms and -phobias to not only make sure that they continue to not care, but that in some cases they actively cheer on said oppression.

Land of the free, but not for you and me. It's reserved only for those who pay an entrance fee.

"Land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy."

Propaganda is one hell of a drug.

Well, the justice department decided to let Michael Flynn go free, so the US is still the land of the free for certain definitions of free.

You're mistaken; the "free" means "economic freedom", not anything to do with personal liberties.

I think the Puritans deem freedom to be economic freedom and that your expression should be done through business. Be the change (coins) you see in the world.

… and to those at the borders clamouring to get in.