I don’t normally get into psychology, but this is pretty interesting. Here are highlights of the documentary to think about.

1. The other guards could have stopped the bad guards, but didn’t. This corresponds to modern day police. When one cop starts abusing someone, the others join in, or at the very least don’t do anything to stop the abuse.
2. The other prisoners let the prisoners who stand up against the abusers stand alone. A good example of this is when someone doesn’t pay the IRS, and stands trial before a jury of their peers (who you would think would also like to not pay their taxes). They are found guilty an overwhelming majority of the time. Rather than root for the guy who is willing to be one of the first people to put their neck out for liberty and justice, people send him to prison.
3. Authority corrupts people. As they said in the documentary, the prison guards were normal people, who when given authority went nuts.

It’s crazy to think that these guinea pigs completely bought into their roles in what they knew was an experiment. The sad truth is that our system is no more valid than the nuts in the Stanford basement. There is no moral foundation for our system of government other than might makes right.

You give a guy a costume, a badge and a gun, tell him he’s a cop and he’s willing to go out and destroy fellow human beings for selling untaxed cigarettes (e.g. Eric Garner). The badge is a piece of tin, with no authority or validity other than his willingness to commit violence.

A guy on Facebook posted this:

The position he takes is that he’s protecting our rights. That is one of the public relations talking points of government, but it doesn’t really work. If they’re really concerned about our rights, why do they force us to pay them? Why do they violate my right to private property in order to protect my rights?

The whole system is fundamentally flawed. They’ve built this enormous edifice of government and law enforcement on weak and shifting, self-contradictory sand (to borrow an analogy from Christ).

I’d much rather they didn’t exist, and I’ll protect my God-given rights myself, or by paying someone voluntarily, if it becomes necessary. It makes no sense that the government coerces me to protect me from coercion. They need to find a new way. Might I suggest the biblical way? Anything else will lead to these self-contradictions.

It’s hard to respect the heart of those who rob me blind so they can pretend to be my defender.

It happens occasionally…local law enforcement stands up to the federal government. In this case, Elkhart County, Indiana sheriff stood up to the FDA for harassing a farmer selling raw milk. A letter threatening to arrest them for trespassing and telling them that he needs to be informed of any further action they take beforehand was all it took to get the feds off the farmer’s back for good. That was four years ago.

All it took was a letter from the sheriff and the feds have left the farmer alone.

Because it’s so simple, so good, so right and so easy. The story has received new attention, because the sheriff was asked about it and wrote about it for the local newspaper.

It’s not like he did something so spectacular, daring and bold. He wrote a letter and they backed off. Why can’t sheriffs across the country write a letter? How many injustices do the feds commit? And all it would take is a letter from a lesser magistrate.

This is what we need, and it’s exactly what is not happening. This is why the local cops are just as bad and tyrannical as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Obama. They do what they’re told almost always, whether it’s right or wrong, as if they have no idea what right or wrong is.

If this kind of thing happened regularly and often, (because it needs to happen often), if this type of story was old hat, we could take this country back. But until then…

Apparently, this cop has never heard of the 4th Amendment, which would require him to have suspicion that a crime has been committed before pulling someone over. I guess in his mind he can make up for such pesky nuisance with bluster and intimidation.

We need to teach our children to stand up to these people, know their rights, like the guy in the video.

There are all kinds of problems with this video offering an apologetic for police brutality. But using the data cited in the video reveals a whole other issue with the system.

A commenter on the video says:

If officers contact 53,000,000 people per year, and there are 670,000 cops, and let’s say 250 working days per year (52 weeks minus 10 vacation days). There would be 167 million cop days per year. Fifty-three million contacts divided by 167 million cop days means that on average a cop has contact with 0.32 citizens per day. Or the average cop contacts one citizen every 3 days. If we can get cops moving at the breakneck speed of 1 citizen contact per day, we could lay off 2/3 of all cops.

I just saved this country billions of dollars.

A cop-lover, antagonistic to the embarrassing math, pointed out that a lot of cops work 12-hour shifts rather than 8-hour shifts. This would change the math, and the number of contacts per shift change to 0.5 contacts per shift. The rise in contacts per shift is only due to longer shifts. Contacts/hour would remain the same, and the point remains.

Personally, I would like to see police abolished, but the point is that government workers are all terribly inefficient, because they’re paid by money taken by force. The “customers” are forced to pay whether they’re happy with the service or not.

I happened across this video that illustrates the point that so many cops could be laid off with little effect, because the government is so wasteful. Enjoy the proven point in this 1 minute video.

If this doesn’t make you indignant, I don’t know what will. I don’t know if this is still the freest country in the world. But if this is the freest country in the world, the world is in big trouble. Even if we are the freest country in the world, that wouldn’t excuse us from doing something about the tyranny we face.