&

“Do you have the legal right to run around with a video camera at a police rally, wearing a Pigs Suck! t-shirt and photographing the cops?”

&
@86 “Appeal to Popularity fallacy all you like”

Since the motor home crew did not call anyone pigs, wear t-shirts calling anyone pigs or act in anyway disrespectful, I think you are guilty of the Red Herring fallacy or is it the Straw Man?

No crap, everything is a jail-able offense below the Mason-Dixon line.

(Maine 148 per 100,000)

While you’re honing your skills in logic, perhaps you can add “debate points in the context they were given” to your skillset.

You going to actual put forth a cogent argument or are you going to continue dodging points raised in opposition to your veiw?

Also, it was in response to the claim that we are living in a police state. Your response was seriously lacking. How many people living in the Soviet Union were arrested by the secret police, sent to the gulag, and so forth? How many were like you, kept their heads down, did what they were told and largely went on with their lives? My guess is most people fell in the latter catagory. As such, most people in the former Soviet Union could have written something not unlike what you did. In short, my observation still stands–unrepresentative sample thus a rather piss poor argument.

Maybe the claim that we live in a police state is wrong, but you have yet to provide a sufficient argument to rebut…well pretty much everything here.

Didn’t think so.

For example, this variant (by Muffy) of the argument I’ve made,

Good cops keep their cool. What a different experience it would have been for the MD crew to say they taped an officer who pulled them over down south, and the cop was totally professional, surprising them all, even after seeing all those ‘radical’ bumperstickers.

You are ready to heap scorn on these petulent children, but you don’t fault the police fore being overzealous and quite possibly trampling people’s rights. If the cop pulled them over, called in back up, verified the guns were stored correctly and that the driver had a valid license, registration and insurance, then let them go on their way, there would be nothing to this. Maybe even some good press for cops.

But you keep right on ignoring this argument.

You fail.

Just like every customer service agent across the country (and these days, the world), as a cop you have to deal with some people who are dicks. If you pull over a bunch of puckish kids and they give you a hard time you don’t get to pepper spray and threaten them just because you have a badge.

Good cops keep their cool. What a different experience it would have been for the MD crew to say they taped an officer who pulled them over down south, and the cop was totally professional, surprising them all, even after seeing all those ‘radical’ bumperstickers.

He deserved what he got.
He was unconscious, so no harm, no foul.
What’s the problem?
Way to go guys!!
Taught him a lesson he won’t forget.
They should have killed him.

Have I forgotten anything?

Honestly, you haven’t peeved me at all. And I don’t think I’ve annoyed you any more than anybody else who isn’t well received in any forum. Just in case you thought the spirit of my posts were anywhere near combative.

See what I did there?

Strangely, I can’t think of a single time in at least the past week that I thought to myself, “Damnit, there goes that Govt Official stamping his jackboots all over my rights again.”

I didn’t get pulled over in traffic for no reason. No police knocked on the door to see how many guns I’ve got in the house. No one called demanding i list the websites I’d visited, and curiously no piles of books were burning downtown.

There you go, because thorn never experiences it anymore, it doesn’t matter anymore. That was one heck of a call to that watch commander.

Of course, boring logic choppers such as myself would note that this is an unrepresentative sample.

Are you aware that all three officers that fired on Kathryn Johnston went to prison?

Wrote the person who is interested in generalities. Yes, sure those specific officers got caught and punished. Nevermind that it took one of their informants running to the FBI, that the local department was already in cover-up mode, and that in several other cases little or nothing has happened to the officers who use too much force (Calvo, Culosi, etc.).

And I’ll reiterate once more, even if these guys were baiting the cops, so what? Aren’t cops supposed to be “professionals” who are “highly trained” to deal with a variety of difficult situations? Or are they thugs who become needlessly aggressive at the slightest indication of someone not deferring to their authority? Your answer is apparently that the latter is fine. After all, if they didn’t bait the cops, why they’d be fine. And nevermind that video taping a police officer doing his job is nowhere illegal.