Show me what a police state looks like! (Graphic! Dial-up warning!) Updated with livestream link

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45. The differences you cite are part of a finely-tuned equation of repression

America is still wealthy enough to bribe most of the middle class into acquiescence. More negative but still relatively mild repressive tactics are reserved for the poor and include stop-and-frisk, widescale imprisonment of young men, and threats of loss of food and housing benefits.

What you're seeing on the streets of Chicago is the second stage of repression, which gets pulled out only in times of actual civil unrest. It is based on the assumption that if you can beat up or arrest a lot of middle class kids in a very public manner, they will eventually get discouraged and go back to their video games. Show trials for people like Bradley Manning (and Julian Assange, if they ever get their hands on him) are also part of this tactic of criminalizing dissent.

We haven't seen third-world style disappearances and torture because so far they haven't been necessary -- but if they were, there would be nothing in our current system to prevent them from happening.

That is the basic logic of a police state: The police can pretty much do anything they want to without being questioned. They can say, "We had information these people were making Molotov cocktails" or "We heard someone would be carrying an IED in a backpack," and that gives them license to break in without a warrant, arrest people and keep them incommunicado for three days, or use violence to force peaceful crowds to disperse.

And it's the existence of that logic -- and not the level of actual atrocity -- that defines when you've moved into a police state and are no longer under the rule of law.