StableOutshoot
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User ID: 2253
I would say it's more like, the left does not limit themselves to acting through the legislature, because they don't care about whether their methods are legitimized by the system or not. They care about getting their way.
The right cares a lot more about rules and principles and is a lot more willing to accept defeat on individual issues because they think that a stable order which obeys predictable rules is more important than any particular issue.
StableOutshoot
10d ago
This sort of makes my point. Your best examples are two incidents from a decade ago that received exactly zero institutional support or even particularly much sympathy. These incidents had zero influence on any law or policy.
StableOutshoot
10d ago
I think it'd make sense here for you to explain in a bit more detail what the word "system" exactly entails here.
Essentially, the entire apparatus that produces and legitimizes political power and authority in the US. The constitution plus the processes and institutions that have grown around it, such as the parties and everything they get up to.
StableOutshoot
10d ago
Sure, the typical conservative does not agree with a lot of government policy or expect the government to behave in ways they approve of
So tell me, what has the right done to change this state of affairs?
Exactly zero right wing people are out in the streets getting themselves shot by cops for interfering with the enforcement of government policies they disapprove of.
The right is voting, and accepting the results when they don't win the vote.
The right accepts the legitimacy of the system even when it produces results they don't approve of.
The left believes that if the system produces results they don't approve of, this is evidence of the illegitimacy of the system, and they engage in extralegal shenanigans to nullify the results of elections that don't go their way.
StableOutshoot
10d ago
It's about control of the media, but also, having a mass movement of people willing to coordinate resistance. The right is bad at this because they believe in the legitimacy of the system, and in working toward the changes they want via the legitimate means provided by the system. The left basically believes that any system that does not result in their desired outcome is not legitimate, and are therefore a lot more willing to resort to extralegal means when they don't get their way.
What this means in practice is that the right will sit by and think "aww shucks it's a shame that guy got arrested for violating that magazine ban" and hope that maybe one of these days the 9th circuit will stop ignoring clear SCOTUS directives (spoiler: they won't). The left, meanwhile, will organize illegal street blockades where armed activists illegally detain motorists in order to check if they're feds, and face zero legal consequences because they elected an attorney general who self-identifies as antifa.
StableOutshoot
14d ago
California v. CTRLPEW
It's absurd to me that, post-Bruen, this case was not immediately yeeted on 2A grounds. There is no historical tradition in the United States of regulating firearms manufacture by banning the distribution of blueprints for firearms. The fact that the Supreme Court can lay down very clear precedent and lower courts are free to plug their ears and say "lalala I can't hear you" is bordering on a constitutional crisis.
StableOutshoot
17d ago
The Winter Olympics is happening right now. Is it just me, or do the Olympics feel like they are far less culturally relevant than they used to be?
StableOutshoot
28d ago
It's not civil disobedience because no church represents the local/state/federal government. This is also why it isn't terrorism per se.
A terrorist act does not have to be committed against a government entity in order to be a terrorist attack. The World Trade Center was not a government building yet 9/11 is considered a terrorist act.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
A lot of conservatives called him dumb anyway. At the time I had a lot more belief that the US still had rule of law, and characterized Kenosha Kyle as taking a risk that was justified by a vacuum of state capacity to restore order.
In hindsight I have realized that if you were in the sort of political jurisdiction where you could carry a rifle for self defense against rioters and expect that to go well for you, nobody would be rioting in that jurisdiction in the first place. If the state is letting people riot, you're living under anarcho-tyranny and you should just move somewhere that has rule of law.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
there is basically no evidence for an accidental discharge
Oh yes there is, the gun was a Sig P320
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
They advertise a 15 minute installation process and I think that's pretty accurate.
Basically, your car has a camera for its stock ADAS under a plastic cover behind the rear view mirror. You pull that cover off and patch in a wiring harness that lets the Comma override the signals from the stock ADAS and replace it with its own. Then you close that up, loop a wire out of the harness you just installed into the Comma device that you mounted on your windshield, and voila.
It ships without the autopilot software, you have to connect it to wifi and download it. This is pretty easy, though the process for connecting to wifi was slightly unclear.
The first time the autopilot software boots up it asks you to drive manually for a bit to calibrate itself to the way it is mounted in your car (pitch and roll angles mostly). Then you just activate cruise control the way you normally would, and the Comma starts driving.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
Are you saying that you are absolutely certain Renee Good tried to run Jonathan Ross over with her car?
I am absolutely certain that Jonathan Ross had, at that moment, a reasonable belief that he was exposed to death or bodily harm. Good's intent, in hindsight, has no bearing on this.
How do you know that?
Because people recorded it and put the footage on the internet.
You can be hit by a car a low speed and not be harmed.
- Even a slow moving vehicle can kill you if you fall under the tires.
- Self defense does not require you to have been harmed, it requires you to reasonably believe that you have been exposed to harm.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
I don't expect navigation to ever be a truly solid part of Comma, simply because it only has forward-facing cameras, so it can't merge on freeways or make turns that require checking for traffic by itself.
The other complication is that navigation databases are so bad that they even make humans make wrong turns. Google Maps is constantly telling me to turn onto roads calling them by names that don't exist on any road sign anywhere. For example here in Minneapolis, a certain road leading out of town to the south is called "highway 65" by Google Maps. Zero actual road signs call it that.
Maybe an autonomous navigation system will have a better time just because it cares a lot less about what roads are called, but unless the navigation databases include things like which lanes of freeways fork off into which directions, it still needs to read those signs.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
Well, is it any good?
I am impressed with it. A solid upgrade over my car's stock ADAS (2021 Toyota Prius).
I'm curious if it's "Waymo-like"
Very much no. The device only has forward-facing cameras, so it is not aware of your surroundings, so it would be impossible for it to autonomously do things like make turns that require checking for traffic, merge or change lanes on the freeway, etc.
The way to think of it is an upgraded ADAS, like the automatic lanekeeping and assisted cruise control that comes with the car, except significantly upgraded.
(you can pretty much stop paying attention and trust in the machine)
The Comma has a camera pointed at you that has its own machine vision algorithm checking to see if you are paying attention to the road, and if you're not, it complains at you and turns itself off. So no, you cannot stop paying attention.
On the flip side, it is very trustworthy.
It feels sort of like riding a horse. A horse knows how to follow a trail, you don't have to micromanage it, it just needs you to nudge it sometimes to indicate where you want it to go.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
You, the driver, are 100% legally responsible for the trajectory of your vehicle. It's legally no different from the ADAS built into your car.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
I got a Comma autopilot for my car. AMA.
I mostly wanted to point out that there are also other paths for recourse that don't rely on that Minnesotan statute.
In this instance, sure
But you can't rely on the feds to step in every single time the state engages in politically motivated prosecution practices.
At the moment, the government of Minnesota is signalling to its constituents that the policy of the state of Minnesota is that Democratic Party loyalists will be privileged under the law, which has enormous implications for anyone who is not a Democratic Party loyalist.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
There's also the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act of 1994 that was originally intended to nerf abortion protestors, but contains a parallel for places of religious worship:
That's federal law, Minnesota can only bring prosecution for state laws. The feds are investigating prosecutions under the FACE act and, amusingly, the KKK act. But I am fairly confident that we would not be seeing federal prosecutions for this under a Harris presidency (though under a Harris presidency, these people wouldn't be rioting), which rather raises the urgency of preventing the Democrats from regaining the presidency.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
So, speaking of attorneys general
Minnesota state attorney general Keith Ellison has gone on record saying he believes the recent storming of a church by protestors in Minneapolis to be a lawful act of protest.
Minnesota Statute 609.28 is titled "Interfering with religious observance" and makes it a misdemeanor to "by threats or violence, intentionally prevent another person from performing any lawful act enjoined upon or recommended to the person by the religion which the person professes".
Now, I'm not a lawyer. It seems to me that this protest very definitely did intentionally prevent people from performing a religious service. The only iffy part is whether the "by threats or violence" criteria is met by the protestors' behavior. The people in the church certainly reasonably felt threatened, which is the standard for most other crimes involving the word "threat". But not a single Democratic Party official in the state of Minnesota, or as far as I know anywhere in the country, has denounced this act, and the guy in charge of prosecuting crimes in the state of Minnesota is willing to go on a podcast and tell all of the Christian worshippers in the state of Minnesota that mobs are allowed to descend upon their services at any time for any reason despite a clear statutory prohibition on doing so.
The situation in Minnesota is thus the same as the situation you outline in Virginia - The attorney general has now demonstrated that he will use his authority to shield unlawful behavior by his political allies against his political opponents.
I am giving a lot of consideration to moving out of Minnesota.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
Not while Trump is still president. I'm not sure what Trump's ATF would do about states using Minnesota's example to justify nullifying federal gun laws, but I doubt it would mean troops rolling into red states.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
Even with an economic depression and a completely delegitimized government (suppose that the Senate and Congress were forcibly realigned under a president for life) there is still the military and if they are united on one side, that side wins.
The wrinkle there is that the military swears their oath to the constitution, and my understanding is that a good chunk of the leadership is the product of 8 years of the Obama administration selecting officers for blue tribe loyalties. I doubt the military would go along with any red tribe attempt to subvert the constitution. Blue state national guards, and maybe a lot of the red states as well, would refuse to obey the president. Then you'd have yourself civil war 2.0.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
If you broke up the problem into the phases needed to get to civil war, you'd find more offramps than onramps,
Yes, but what if all of the parties involved are steadfastly determined to refuse every single offramp that is given to them?
In Minnesota, I think monkeys will fly out of my butt before the federal government ever does anything to create the appearance that a state can veto federal laws by just rioting hard enough. The feds pulling ICE out of Minnesota would be the end of the USA. Won't happen. The millisecond that ICE pulls out of Minnesota, every single state in the union will declare the nullification of whatever federal laws they don't like. Gun laws in the red states, immigration laws in the blue states. Federal supremacy will be over.
But on the other hand, the "we are living in the fifth reich" narrative has taken off and is well beyond the control of anyone at this point.
I think the best case is that we end up with The Troubles Part 2: Electric Boogaloo - persistent asymmetric conflict whose intensity doesn't quite ascend to Civil War status, but which certainly doesn't quality as "peace." This lasts a minimum of three years while Trump is still president, and either ends with the election of a blue president (who?) or shifts into second gear with the election of JD Vance. The understanding that another blue president would definitely throw the borders wide-fucking-open the instant they swear the oath of office would likely be the major issue of the 2028 campaign.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
So, a little update, they are apparently not charging him under a law signed by Bill Clinton to protect abortion clinics, they're charging him, a black man, under a law named after the KKK, signed by Ulysses S. Grant to protect newly freed slaves, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I love this timeline.
StableOutshoot
1mo ago
It means that people will receive it even if you don't like them. There's a portion of the population who absolutely will not accept that.
Absolutely. Look at the cancellation phenomenon: The faction who "believes" that health care, food, and housing are human rights, the first thing they go after if you oppose them is your job, the means by which you attain your health care, food, and housing. It rather exposes the whole game - they don't want state control of these things in order to ensure that everyone has them, they want state control over these things in order to ensure they are given to their friends and denied to their enemies. This is by far the biggest argument in favor of totally eliminating the welfare state.
Where the current decade of mostly-peaceful-protesting misses, though, is the fact that activists are demonstrably not engaging in "illegal but moral" behavior. It's actually not okay to loot businesses. It's not okay to block a roadway. It's not okay to deface works of art. It's not okay to hit a police officer with your car. It's not okay to de-arrest people. There is no behavior being engaged in here that a typical uninvolved normie is going to look at and say "actually, I think these are perfectly fine behaviors for people to do outside of the context of a protest." And the fact that they are conducted as part of a protest doesn't legitimize them to anybody except people already on board with the movement.
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