It’s a lot more sinister than that.

He started with the immigrants, because there was a tenuous theory under which his personal police force was allowed to fuck them up and do whatever they want. Some little speedbumps aside, that worked out okay, no one stopped it. Now he’s talking about federalizing the police force in one particular place, and moving on to the next target, who are citizens, American people, and where there’s not even that vague theory that he’s got a right to be throwing them in detention and letting them die of the natural conditions there.

If no one stops that, then it moves on to the next group.

Back into the global game?

They collapsed from being a global superpower, to selling off their natural resources to enrich a couple of hundred of the worst people on the planet, and beating up their neighbors for oil money and mostly being ignored by most of the rest of the world unless there’s an Olympics or something. Putin didn’t cause all of that of course, but he had a huge amount to do with entrenching the systems of corruption that doomed any chance they would have had of recovering their superpower status as China or Europe did after major catastrophes happened to them.

And now, as of the last few years, they can’t even beat up their neighbors anymore. Sure, they still have a huge impact on the world stage in the form of destabilizing foreign democracies. You’re not wrong about that part. But that’s another example of my point: The whole shtick is just weakening everyone else. It won’t do anything at all to increase their military power, increase standards of living for either oligarchs or common people. It won’t help them win any of those regional wars. And it definitely won’t help them against any threat that comes from “outside the sphere” (bird flu or climate change or whatever). It’s just more Tanya Harding shit.

All the Putin jokes aside, I don’t think he’s doing it for geopolitical or treasonous reasons. I think it’s mainly just a by-product of his style of interaction and competition, which exists for very logical (“logical”) reasons and which he’s been able to make work pretty well for himself.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-weak-strongman

Snyder says it better than I can, but basically, he is weak and stupid, but he needs to be able to dominate people around him, and so his whole strategy is to attack and weaken, because that’s his only way to be able to compete effectively. He can usually dominate the weakened version of whatever he’s attacking, in a way he never could if it was at full strength. It’s why he shows such innate and passionate violence against anything or anyone that is organized, effective, or popular: Because someday, they might turn against him, and if they did they would definitely win, and so he has to Nancy Kerrigan them before they get a chance.

Again Snyder summarizes it better, but it is also the exact same model that Putin uses, and it’s had exactly the same effect on Russia (taking it from at least a regional powerhouse and functioning country that could accomplish significant things, to being a pariah state that barely functions in the first place even internally.) The strategy only works for as long as there is no one “outside the wall” who can come into the sphere of influence in un-weakened form, and if that ever happens, then the strongman crumbles instantly into impotent rubble. To ever let one of these people get control of your country or organization is basically just a nonstop rolling catastrophe that just gets worse and worse the longer they hold on to power.

who said he was surrounded and attacked by 10 young assailants outside his car

X

I fully expect that at some point soon someone will release video showing Señor Balls creating or escalating a confrontation with two or three fifteen-year-olds, and then them beating the shit out of him in turn while he cowers.

Edit: I checked the photo. The fact that his shirt was off, but apparently undamaged, is I feel like another little clue supporting my random speculation here.

It is rare for me to read something on the internet that literally knocks me back in my chair a little

You gotta talk to the legislature, tell them that if someone gets pulled over the rule should be that they get to just tell the cops to go fuck themselves, and it’s okay because ACAB.

Start a movement, see if you can get a whole city where the city council’s on board with it. Try the experiment. Things aren’t as fixed as you think they are, a lot of it is changeable. (Well, on the local level at least, IDK if we wait a year you may get your fantasy coming true where the federal level is defining what law enforcement is, and no one who’s a “civilian” can exercise any control over it.)

What the fuck, he looks weird and awful even in the retouched version. He looks like Michael Scott wearing the women’s blazer. He looks like a lumpy old sofa that’s gotten shiny where people have rubbed it too much. He looks like he has no eyes and has stolen some other person’s teeth but they don’t quite fit in his mouth right. He just looks fuckin’ weird.

WHAT THE FUCK THAT ONE’S WORSE

Yeah, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, I just don’t know of it.

I also like that judge, AI voice aside I feel like he has a perfectly valid point. I also have a feeling he was the same judge I saw scorching a prosecutor one time for cutting a plea deal where it seemed like they could have prosecuted the guy and he was getting away with sexual assault with a pretty minimal sentence, and he was furious at the prosecutor for not doing their job. He couldn’t exactly just take over the prosecution’s job for them, I think he sent the lawyers away to work out a new plea deal instead, and they came back with one that was still pretty minimal but I think added in some jail time. He sort of yelled at the guy some more and then just approved the plea deal, but if that is the judge I’m thinking of, it seems like he cares a lot about the purpose of what he’s doing, which is a really good thing.

I linked to the full bodycam video, the officer clearly says that there were two reasons for the stop: Headlights and seat belt.

Your video has the AI voice claiming that failing to give a Miranda warning before opening the door is a “clear 4th amendment red flag.” That’s a load of steaming crap. Moving on to the actual issue at hand, the charge there was for unlawful carrying of a weapon. The judge’s decision is that by the officer randomly opening the door of the guy’s vehicle, and then seeing the weapon, that means it was an unlawful search (it was “in plain view” according to the officer / prosecutor, but the judge says it wasn’t in plain view until you opened the door). That has literally nothing at all to do with the initial stop being unconstitutional, or failure to ID or anything. It’s just to do with how the cop found the gun.

Do you have one where the person failed to ID on a traffic stop, and their lawyer was able to make the argument that the initial stop was improper, and so they didn’t have to, and it worked? I feel like those would be super-easy to find, if that argument ever worked, since it is very commonly what people say while they are refusing to ID, and so if their lawyers were able to make it work we would have examples of it working.

https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/what-is-an-unlawful-police-stop-23464

If the cop sees you (allegedly) not wearing your seat belt, and then pulls you over for a seat belt violation, that’s a legal stop. I sort of agree with you that the headlights thing is bullshit (and briefly looking at the internet I think you’re right). For all I know the officer realized that the headlights was bullshit, and randomly added in the seat belt thing. But, regardless, him saying the issue was the seat belt is going to hold up in court completely, and so refusing to ID based on that is going to get you in trouble. Your lawyer is going to have a hell of a time making that argument, especially if you then obstructed and resisted arrest.

IDK where this “if I don’t agree, then I need to physically resist the cops, because it’ll be okay” thinking came from, but that’s not how it works legally. That’s part of why I am taking time to disagree with this, because people do get busted for crimes because of listening to what the internet told them.

And to answer yoir question, if you find footage where the initial stop was deemed unconstitutional, but the subsequent conviction fir failing to ID stands, I will accept that I am wrong.

What was a stop where the initial stop was even deemed unconstitutional? If I knew that, then I might be able to answer you. Except for some landmark cases, I don’t really know of it happening. I feel like that doesn’t happen very often. I feel like people getting charged for failing to ID is very common (including where they are trying to argue on the side of the road that the stop is improper in some way, and that’s why they are failing to ID and it’s okay.) That’s sort of my point.

You’re defining this as an illegal stop. It was not, in the legal terminology, an illegal stop. That’s part of where your confusion is coming in, I think.

I’m happy to find you one of these bodycam YouTube videos of someone failing to ID and getting their window busted out, and then look up the records and see if they actually got convicted of the failure to ID (or obstruction or whatever the statute is where they are). It may take me until later today. Would that influence you, if I found that?

He didnt do anything wrong - he was entirely within his rights to ask for a supervisor.

Absolutely (although they’re not obligated to fulfill the request… a lot of departments will, partly because when the stop is getting complicated they may want a supervisor to show up there anyway.) But anyway, that doesn’t absolve him of the requirement to provide an ID. He was arrested for failing to provide the ID, not for asking for a supervisor. Asking for the supervisor was a-OK, and if he’d done that while handing over his ID, he would have been fine.

Because if I fucking recall, George Floyd was not fighting back.

Yeah, and that’s why the cop is in prison right now alongside everyone who was with him that day. That was my point.

Pre-2014, charges for the cops were very rare even when they straight-up just shot somebody for more or less no reason. After that, it was intermittent, until 2020 was the inflection point where charges became practically universal, and also, those big walls of names of people who hadn’t done a damn thing who the cops had killed started drying up, because stuff had actually changed.

There’s a lot that still needs to change, a lot of bad things baked into the system still. But of course some dickheads can only hold one fairly simple type of world model in their head at one time, and so whenever any type of police interaction goes sideways in any manner, even one like this where it is objectively about 90% the guy in the driver’s seat who causes the whole issue in the first place, they start screaming BLACK LIVES MATTER, BLACK LIVES MATTER like that’s going to help everything get better.

This guy isn’t solving police brutality. He is helping to justify it, by diluting the examples of people who actually didn’t do anything, and providing a good example for people who want to say Breonna Taylor deserved it or whatever. Stop making him out as making some bold anti-racist stand because of what some other people did, successfully.

I think I’m just going to say this one more time and then be done with this thread: There are a lot of people who offer the legal theory you’re saying here, right before they get arrested on charges that stick. You can find literally thousands of them on YouTube.

BECAUSE PEOPLE STARTED PROTESTING AFTER THIS SHIT KEPT HAPPENING, AND PEOPLE FUCKING DIED.

Yeah, sounds great. Among other things I think burning down the 3rd precinct had a lot to do with changing the overall dynamic, just because like a lot of things, if people are dealing with some population that can fight back, they react differently than if the people can’t. I am saying that starting to yell at every cop that pulls you over and refuse to ID yourself is not really going to change the system, if you did it for a thousand years.

I know people with way worse than your experience. Yes, it sucks. It would have been much worse if you’d decided “You know what, I think this is a bunch of crap, no you can’t have my ID and I’m not getting out of the car”. That’s part of my point.

IDK why you’re yelling at me, like I’m saying that the cops never did/do anything wrong. I’m saying this dude created his own situation, and people who are one-side-is-fine-other-side-did-everything-wrong, like you are here, are enabling other people to go down his same path, ignore the laws and cops that are reasonable, and then pretend they did nothing wrong and it’s shocking and surprising that they got yanked out and arrested. It’s all everyone else’s fault. Don’t be like this guy.

Used by some power tripping asshole it’s their easiest path to making the stop violent.

Ding ding ding

The system still has some massive problems. If your goal is less police brutality and reform of the system, though, committing crimes in front of the police and refusing to cooperate with them in any way unless they use force is not going to be a real good way to go after that goal.

I’ve seen situations that are way worse than this one. One guy got spooked (like legitimately spooked, you could tell he was for-real scared that the cops were going to do something to him) when he got stopped for an open container in the car. They asked him to get out of the car, he took off instead, crashed his car, foot chase, they tackled him, he ended the night with a bunch of felonies and his car totaled. That’s one reason I think this stuff is so absurd and dangerous when people say it on the internet; sometimes it translates to real world behavior too. You could tell that he was influenced by it, and that’s part of why he thought stomping on the gas and making the situation a hundred times worse was the right play.

The fact that you think this would have gone substantially better for him by just complying

“Can I see your ID?”

“Sure, here you go. You know this is bullshit, though. It’s not raining.”

“HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT TO ME YOU DIRTY (baton strike) FILTHY (baton strike) MOTHER (baton strike) FUCKER”

I mean, maybe. That’s kind of how it used to be, I grew up during that time, it happened to some people I knew. One of the big changes that’s happened recently is that almost always when the cops behave that way in the modern day, they actually get charges. That’s new, like within just the last few years that it started happening consistently. How did that change happen? That’s actually a really important question, and I think you’re glossing over a lot of how we got there by looking at the whole thing through this absolutely absurd lens.

There was no reason for them to escalate.

Challenging this nonsense is the way, historically, any change has happened.

You are just arguing against people doing the right thing

Man… we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this, and just leave it at that.

No. There are a lot of circumstances where you can refuse to ID. A traffic stop for a specific infraction isn’t one of them. There’s actually a lot that goes into the courts trying to strike a reasonable balance.

Wait, am I crazy, or did I literally give an example of a situation where you don’t have to ID in the comment you’re replying to? I feel like probably the useful content of this conversation is at an end…

I am just uncomfortable telling people “just comply, or you’ll make things worse,”

Yeah, I get that. A lot of it depends on the details. If ICE is arresting your family for literally nothing at all, and you may never see them again, then yes, not complying is going to make things worse, but it’s hard for me to say that people “should” comply for that reason. Fuck 'em.

This is not that. This is just a bullshit traffic stop. I get that the frustration comes from the racism inherent in the system, it’s not just the traffic stop, but you gotta be smart about when and how to resist. Getting stubborn and hostile with some random traffic cop and getting tons more charges thrown at you as a result is not going to undo the racism. It also bugs me that people (look around this thread) have some kind of idea that they’re legally in the right if they decide to start arguing with the cops in this way, which… if you’re going to decide to do that (either when getting the ticket or with ICE or anywhere in between), you should have a clear eyed understanding of what you’re getting yourself into.

Basically, I definitely don’t think it’s a good thing people on the internet telling each other how it works and setting up for more things like this to happen to drivers who don’t expect how it is going to play out.

In my opinion the stop is not justified, so the officer has no legal basis to ID the driver.

… said any number of people, right before they got arrested.

There are circumstances where you can refuse to ID. Probably the only video I can ever remember which featured a supervisor showing up and actually taking the side of the suspect, was a cop hassling a person who was taking video of a police department, some patrolman came out and asked for ID, and the guy told him to get lost because he wasn’t doing anything. That sort of falls into “bold move Cotton” territory, but it is legal, and when the supervisor showed up he told the cop so and ordered him to just leave the guy alone.

Refusing to ID on a traffic stop because you disagree with the reason for the stop is going to get you arrested, it’s going to make it harder to fight the original citation even if you are in the right, and it’s going to get you additional charges that are a much bigger deal than the original traffic citation. That’s just reality, both legal reality and how it’s going to happen in practice. You don’t have to agree with the cop to have to provide ID, otherwise any random person ever pulled over for anything at all could just tell the cop to get lost, I don’t agree, and the cop would have to leave and the person could go on their way.