New Testingstan

Did I mention that in the US the legal rationale at the federal level for allowing DUI checkpoints that some states use to conduct them has also explicitly been extended to "citizenship checkpoints" operated by the Border Patrol within 100 miles of any land or sea border, which includes all US sea coasts, so that we had the Border Patrol some years ago setting up roadblocks on a section of Washington State with two roads in and out and stopping all the cars and asking everyone's citizenship status and demanding passports from anyone who looked suspicious i.e. nonwhite. Fortunately the local Sheriffs said if anything went wrong at the checkpoints the BoPas would get no backup even if it was a shootout, and local rather obviously white people rode a bus through one and none had ID and all refused to confirm their citizenship. After several protests like that, they gave up, but unfortunately not all areas of the country are that awesome so this is still a going problem.

land of the free

Maybe when you've been asked "Papers Please" randomly by federal police while driving out to go hiking in the woods in the home state you were born and raised in, from the area of the peninsula you live in to the one your parents owned a dacha in, you'd feel different about allowing any kind of roadblocks whatsoever.

magic princess wrote:The point is that in many states the mere act of recording police without their permission being granted before the camera begins to role is automatically a felony, which you cannot fight back against, as it is a felony regardless of intent; i.e., the mere act is felonious, no matter the purpose.

lolwtf

I'll have to check if it is the case here as well...

This is just one of those things thats different between nations, I have no fear of the police because I know without a doubt that abuses like you described above would be dealt with harshly. For whatever reason, we lack the tolerance for that sort of stuff.

The " no recording" thing is straight up fucking bullshit though. The cop gets a damn dash cam in case i fire on him at a traffic stop, but I can't protect myself by filming you?

No. Fuck you.

I think it's cultural, kind of like the gun thing. When you get down to it, Canada's gun laws aren't really an order of magnitude stricter than U.S. ones, they don't ban guns outright like Britain or Aussieland, but Canada doesn't have the large-scale spree killings that we do, or nearly as much gun violence.

I think the point is that the ideal of breathalizer stops is good, but the sad fact of the matter is that you can't trust US police to organize something as simple as that without politics or bigotry creeping in and turning it into a fiasco.

It is American Exceptionalism. In the sense that the American structure is Exceptionally stupid.

Basically I think the cultural differences boil down to the fact that Canadians are much more likely to view society as a cooperate enterprise than a competitive one like Americans do.

The current American view of society can best be summed up like this

Sometimes I wonder if the problem with the US is that it is just too big, too diverse. De Gaulle jockingly said about France "How do you want to govern a country with more than 400 varieties of cheese ?". I think in this situation, in the us, it would be "How do you want to govern a country with 51 different constitutions and legislations ? [*]"



[*] : I know there's only fifty states, I counted the federal constitution in the lot.

In Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland, it is a felony. In nine other states it is a misdemeanor to record police. Even in states where it is technically legal the police will frequency seize and destroy film and then clog up the legal gutter with objections to you getting your recording device back. With digital, they frequently wipe the camera. So, if I can't record the police at the DUI checkpoint, sorry, I don't want the DUI checkpoint to exist.

++http://www.bainbridgereview.com/opinion/29962474.html The checkpoints.

++http://oakbaystarfish.com/2013/03/04/ch ... t-contest/ And the story on how Washington shut them down.

@oxymoron: Indeed, though that's not possible right now, so we should do the next best thing.


Of course, I'm just trolling to shake things up (I don't believe in an ethical in-group at all btw), but you've still gotta question the value of meat industry reform/humane slaughter. It is like the movie villain who's honor demands he always shoot you in the front, so when he surprises you from behind, he'll call your name before pulling the trigger. He won't actually give you a chance to draw or flee, but this is totally different than just shooting you in the back, or so he believes.

Farm meat animals are being created and live solely for the purpose of serving man. We're going to kill them, when we want to, how we want to, and entirely for our benefit, and the animal has no say in this whatsoever..... so is it really that big of an improvement that they have the illusion of freedom during their pre-determined lives of servitude?

Moreover, if the demand is still there, and especially if you're still having capitalists fulfill it, you're likely just going to move the pain around rather than eliminating it. The animals are still dying, and it will take more land, more labor, probably more fuel, and so on in the process. Remember, the factory farms weren't created because they actively want to be cruel to animals, but rather because there's various pressures that pointed in that direction. (granted some of those pressures are created by the industry themselves but still they are there regardless) If we don't relieve that, something's prolly gotta give.


tbh I'd actually agree there is an improvement, but much smaller than, and no substitute for, cutting back on your consumption.

in other words:

rogueice I think wrote: I don't see why fewer people eating meat would in any way encourage more humane slaughter of animals for food, unless you convert enough people they just go out of business.

My view is that humane slaughter is like a secondary objective, with the primary objective being less slaughter, regardless of method. And fewer people eating meat leads pretty directly to that. Or so I'd hope.

sorry but the idea of anyone taking a known liar at their word and believing it's representative of the united states is hilarious

Well, I already cited the one specific claim I made, and guess what, here's another citation!

++http://www.alternet.org/story/151806/15 ... _brutality

But let's just pretend I wasn't posting links and was just talking.

One thing I find interesting about veganism is that, at least from what I can see, large parts of the social justice movement on tumblr are for some inexplicable reason incredibly hostile towards veganism. It might be due to PETA's disgusting campaigns tainting everything in their eyes or maybe discomfort at the idea that they could be part of a problem when they spend effort trying to fight other ones or something else entirely, but for whatever reason "I'm a vegan" poisons a lot of things over there almost a quickly as "I'm an MRA" and it saddens me.

loads of vegan posts i see on tumblr are classist as hell and so you will obviously get some pushback because of it

but i don't go on there much so maybe it's changed

anyway duchess if you're already posting alternet just get it over with and cite infowars or worldnetdaily

False flag!

What's so bad about Alternet ?

From that article (on page 3) :

In the most comprehensive article to date about recording the police —" The War on Cameras " — Radley Balko interviewed James Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which describes itself as "the world's largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers." Pasco argues that videotaping police officers in public should be illegal because it can intimidate officers from doing their jobs. Mark Donahue, president of FOP, concurs, telling the New York Times that his organization “absolutely supports” the eavesdropping act and was relieved that the ACLU's challenge filed last year failed, adding that recording on-duty police officers “can affect how an officer does his job on the street.”


[...] adding that recording on-duty police officers “can affect how an officer does his job on the street.”


Well... that IS the idea, you know ?

What is funny, when you think about it, is that the same politician who push for more and more CCTV to be put everywhere in the streets and into public buildings, are probably the same who would support the interdiction to film police officers on duty.


By the way, does the CCTV of a shop catching officers on duty count as a felony ?...

No, because if you put warnings that a recording device is in place then it's not a crime. So theoretically a bumper sticker would exempt you.

So if I put a bumper sticker on my dash warning : "Dashcam on board", they would have no ground to charge with felony, as the sticker being visible, them acting in front of it imply their consent to be filmed... does that sound about right ?


Or what about wearing one of these pair of Google Glass and warning the officers that the current exchange is being recorded and uploaded in real-time to the Cloud ?

Yeah I think if you advertise that you have a dashcam then you're ok. However the laws about not filming police in public doesn't sound like it would even get to the SCOTUS it's so unconstitutional.

Problem being that to challenge that kind of situation in court, you need to either have enough money yourself to pay reality good lawyers and / or find the support of the ACLU and hope they do things right.

The ACLU would jump at the chance to destroy those illegal laws.

In that article Duchess linked, which date from 2011, it is said that it's just what it did (note the article is dated 2011-07-27) :

As usual, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has taken the lead in challenging these laws. In August of last year, the ACLU of Illinois filed a federal lawsuit in Chicago challenging the Illinois Eavesdropping Act ( ACLU v. Anita Alvarez ), arguing that "the act violates the First Amendment and has been used to thwart people who simply want to monitor police activity," including the ACLU itself. The Illinois law is unique in that it makes it a crime to record not only private but also public conversations made without consent of all parties. The ACLU lawsuit referred to "six Illinois residents who have faced felony charges after being accused of violating the state’s eavesdropping law for recording police making arrests in public venues."

Although the lawsuit was dismissed in January, the ACLU has appealed the suit and expects to begin making oral arguments sometime in the fall.

[...]

The court's decision in this case is said to be critically important in setting a precedent "that will either protect or endanger newsgatherers‘ constitutional rights to monitor and record police misconduct." Schwartz said the ACLU is "cautiously optimistic" about the eventual ruling, which is expected to be handed down sometime in 2012.

Now we are in 2013. Does anyone know if anything came out of it ?