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If you want to annoy a powertripping cop, giving him an excuse to do what he really wish he could do is not the way to go. Complying until he realises he's wasting his time and he's not going to get you to snap in a way that gives him licence to treat you as uncooperative and belligerent is a much smarter own.
No, this is cope devised to get people to submit. There is in fact no way to win against a powertripping cop -- the problem is coup-complete. If you yield, he wins. If you resist, he hurts you more and wins anyway.
If you yield, he arrests you. If you resist, he beats you up and possibly kills you. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. Sure your pride will take a beating in the former instance, but there are a limited range of circumstances in which I would literally rather be dead than having submitted.
You can rationalize submitting all you want -- and indeed, it is rational -- but nothing will change that it is submission.
If a certain course of action is rational, by definition you can't rationalise your decision to take it.
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The winning move is to get the cop to beat you up without doing anything a reasonable-to-moderately unreasonable observer would construe as deserving (ideally while shouting "come and see the violence inherent in the system"). The insight of people like Gandhi and MLK Jr. was that while the Boot of Power does not tolerate face to face defiance, it ultimately derives its power from a body politic which can, very occasionally, be shamed or disgusted into punishing abuses done in its name.
Unfortunately, this also involves getting beaten up and has a pretty mixed record (bare minimum 1/3rd of the population will say you must have done something to deserve it).
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Sounds like we're all in agreement then, resisting is the worse option.
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You're being silly.
It's one thing to break out the civic resistance card for obvious government overreach. It's quite another to suddenly be a principled libertarian when one is getting a speeding ticket or being pulled off a train by the constables. It has all the sincerity of an atheist in a foxhole. It is transparently self-serving and no one is stupid enough to fall for it.
No shit, being arrested sucks. Being ticketed sucks. But, as you can imagine, that's part of the deterrent value. Why would it be pleasant? Do you envision a police force that politely writes letters of warning that can be easily ignored and have no power to detain you?
The modal person saying these things is not a martyr for civil rights against a overpowerful constabulary: they are habitual rowdies grasping at straws, hoping that saying the right words will get them out of crimes they know they committed. It never works, and then they physically attack the dully employed enforcers of the law. See: the entire run of COPS, liveleak, etc.
Being arrested and being ticketed are not supposed to be deterrents at all. Actual deterrents are administered after a conviction.
I subscribe to the philosophy that the process is the punishment. There is no inherent way of making an arrest or a fine a happy event. No one in the history of the universe has ever been overjoyed to sit in the back of a police car or to pay a fine. Any other frame of viewing it is too idealistic for this sinful earth.
It shouldn't be, since the process also affects the innocent, unlike the actual sentence.
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And yet my view can explain behaviors that your view cannot.
Rather the opposite. It's very easy to say one should only resist for "obvious government overreach" and then whenever one is in a situation where resistance is an option (though not a prudent one), chicken out by saying that one didn't involve enough overreach. Any libertarians resisting speeding tickets or being pulled off a train are living by their principles even when it is harming them.
But we aren't talking about libertarians here, just people who don't want to eat shit. Nobody, as I said, except the most beaten-down milquetoast PMC, likes to eat shit. Most people always do, because they don't want to be literally beaten and/or jailed -- although they'll rarely admit that this is the reason. Some people, for various reasons, have a higher tolerance for pain and social punishment and/or a lower tolerance for shit-eating. Or just a higher time preference. That's all there is to it, really.
Your view explains nothing other than belligerent and argumentative people don't like following rules or laws, which is so stupidly obvious that it is not notable or insightful to observe. Yeah, no shit. So what? I don't like going to my dentist, but that doesn't justify me punching her when I sit down in the chair, or not paying her a hundred bucks for a tooth cleaning.
It is generally accepted that the government, from time to time, can compel you to endure mildly annoying and discomforting situations for the benefit of the society it governs. That is how it has been since ante bellum.
Anyone who wants to pick a fight with dully appointed authority for no good reason is a moron. No, I don't need a strict definition. Gambling your life on the outcome of a speeding ticket or spreading your legs out on two seats on a subway is the province of morons. You are thinking that you are being clever, but you are actually being very stupid, enough that dismissing your opinion without debate is the most productive use of my time.
I see that you are one of those law-n-order conservatives who never expects to find himself on the wrong end of such a situation. I guarantee that if you ever do, you will feel the same visceral aversion to engaging in the appropriate submissive display as Mr. O'Keefe did; perhaps more so because you never expected it. And if you do indeed manage to engage in it, you will feel humiliated and ashamed over your submission, at least until you can concoct yourself some sort of rationalization.
You're leaving out the part where the person getting the speeding ticket actually was speeding. It's not knuckling under and being a cuck to admit that yeah going 50 in a 25 zone probably wasnt kosher, my bad.
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But I would never find myself in such a situation precisely because I never engage in pointless dominance displays. I've been pulled over several times, I've always responded politely and it has neither been humiliating nor escalated. In fact, despite flagrantly speeding I have always gotten away with a warning and never actually received a ticket precisely because of unfailing politeness.
It is only humiliating if you choose to make it humiliating. I say yes sir and no sir to everyone I interact with in commerce, whether it is a cop or a taxi driver. And because I don't have a basketball mentality this doesn't cause me any psychological distress.
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In high school, I bit a man because he was bullying me, in a sincere effort to do him harm.
But I didn't attack the teacher that was sent to collect me, and I certainly didn't scream at the police officer that I talked to.
It would have been very silly of me to do so. Childish.
I knew what I had done was shameful and wrong, but I didn't regret it. And since I had the intelligence of the average person, I didn't take it out on them. And I felt no shame for not quixotically attacking authority in the aftermath. I had already gained my satisfaction.
So you presume wrongly. I demand an apology.
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