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Notes -
Apparently some Amish people about 15 years ago were charged with hate crimes for cutting other Amish men's beards.
They tried to argue that the federal government had no constitutional authority to prosecute them, but the judge ruled that since the scissors used to cut the hair, and the vans used to drive to the men, had at some point crossed state lines, this was a valid prosecution under the interstate commerce clause.
I don't really have the time right now to make this into an effortpost for the main thread. But this is crazy. I'm living in crazytown. How we reached the point where such rulings aren't immediate grounds for revolution, I'll never know.
Part of the answer is that some people wait-and-seed, and eventually the hate crime convictions were overturned for boring technical reasons, and their sentences reduced. There's a fair argument that the results still weren't fair -- the sentencing judge overtly said that he was still trying to give sentence enhancements for the religious focus of the crime, which is kinda sketchy even if specifically authorized by statute -- but it's enough that people who weren't that interested in philosophy of law could claim that everyone had a fair day in court and a neutral law was applied, whether or not it actually was.
Part of the answer is that the Amish are considered weird, and breakaway Amish weirder, and most people don't care about weirdos even where the court is unfair or the law illegitimate. As the list of awful things the government does to weirdos go, it's not going to take a top ten slot, and the people who do care about those top ten slots don't exactly get invited to a lot of parties.
Hell, even as sketchy trials before biased judges go, I can point to worse in pretty recent times.
Reality all adds up to normal. The fiction where one action by a government is so corrupt, awful, self-dealing, evil, and malicious as to result in major political upheaval or revolution is... not impossible, but it's the exception, rather than the rule, and usually downstream of a large mass of other motivating factors. If you look at the motivations for times these sorta things do go hot, there are patterns, and they're often not about anything so prosaic or useful.
It's an unpleasant revelation. Sorry.
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