On 2008-10-07, Harry K > wrote:
> But you see the cop _was_ challenged and lost and if he still has a
> job he isn't about to do that ever again. The _effective_ challenge
> was not one-on-one on the street though, it was in the courts. The
> street challenge was not only ineffective, it cost the person big
> time.

You don't get the court case without standing up in the one-on-one. If
you lick the cops boots and the cop is satisified with the boot licking
there is no court challenge. The actions of the cop are never reviewed
and they will be repeated until he's no longer satisified with someone
licking his boots and he goes ape on someone who did submit or someone
else stands up to him.

That's assuming that the courts are the independent body we are told
they are. In reality, the courts are part of government. Sure, sometimes
in specific instance the court may be the part of a different or larger
government body than one being challenged, but often they will be the
same. It's really a crap shoot if one is going to get anything even
approaching 'fair' in a government court when challenging the
government.

Also, if people don't resist 'on the street' then the government
employees become more bold, they will push further, as any bully would
do. What's the quote...

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have
been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make
an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to
say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as
for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire
city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror
at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase,
but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up
in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes,
hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? . . ." -Alexander
Solzhenitsyn

Certainly not to that extreme yet, but the theme is the same. The reason
we have the mess we do have is that people don't stand up. A cop becomes
conditioned to being the law when 99 people back down to him and then
when one stands up to him he explodes. These government employees would
learn their place if more people would simply stand up for themselves.