gorge
20d ago
(or maybe you could say that the hack took place when that law was implemented, in that including places of worship was not the initial goal of the legislators -- but that seems neither here nor there)
Yeah, I think FACE, hate crimes laws, and some other civil rights era laws are basically hacks on the original U.S.Constitution, which gave police powers by default to the state. But when the federal government assumed basically all sovereignty, it needed ways to takeover police powers when the states weren't doing what the feds wanted.
gorge
20d ago
By state law, it's 100% disorderly conduct, criminal trespass and I think riot in the third degree ("When three or more persons assembled disturb the public peace by an intentional act or threat of unlawful force or violence to person or property, each participant therein is guilty of riot third degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 364 days or to payment of a fine of not more than $1,000, or both."). Any threat of violence would be "gross misdemeanor" assault in Minnesota. The proper response is that the state government of Minnesota should arrest, try, and convict the mob members and send them to prison for a few months each. That would be a proportionate and just response. If the state government of Minnesota refuses to do that because they are on the side of the "protestors" ... well then you are in a state of exception ...One option then, is to hack federal law in order to go after the protestors, which is what the left usually does. It might make sense to make disorderly conduct in sufficient scale and coordination to be a federal felony. That would stop all these "terrorism lite" tactics. Another possibility would be to arrest the actual members of the state government in that case, for conspiracy to deprive rights under color of law. And if you can't get a federal judge to approve it, well, again, you would be in the state of exception. All of these tracks require a plan for the ensuing escalation.
Whenever we think about super-broad generalizations about nation-scale or civilization scale events, we should think of them as being one approximate model, that is one part of a big stack of different models being superimposed over each other. "The Sun has enormous gravity that pulls all objects into the solar system toward it" is a true generalization. But then you notice Jupiter doesn't appear to be being pulled into the sun, the moon rotates around the Earth rather than being pulled in toward the sun, etc. And the answer is, they are being pulled in, but inertia, momentum, and other forces are more powerful at the moment and thus obscuring the particular model.
So "strong men create good times, good times create weak men" is a pattern in history, but it does not always happen, and other forces are at play as well. I think it is basically true with the Rome and the Goths, but it took centuries of good times before the inertial power of the Roman Empire had slowed down enough. And when comparing African versus European races, northern Europeans are still benefiting from thousands of years of being bred to survive the harsh northern climates and a thunderdome of martial competition at the crossroads of empires. A few decades of chaos in Somalia is not yet enough to counteract this.
There are also lots of exceptions and caveats. Certain kinds of hard times just produce even weaker men, particularly I think times of disease and of total anarchy. Hard times can be so hard they just kill everyone off.
America 1600 to 1900 is interesting in that it has "good times" in the sense of so much resource wealth, lumber, soil, navigable rivers, etc, but those things required a lot of work in order to turn into wealth. It wasn't like the "good times" of a late-stage imperial capital where you eat imported bread and wine and go watch shows all day long. And "strong men" bred by centuries of competition in the harsh conditions of Europe were able to take advantage of this great resource bounty and create the most powerful empire in history. America also had a healthy dose of hard times in the form of the threat of Indian Wars, but the Indians were never strong enough to just wipe out the settlers entirely or be so hostile so as to prevent them from developing, as arguable, was the case in Europe where the areas under greater threat from Mongol invasion developed the least, because those invasions could be so destructive.
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