I am not a proponent of the 72 hour detention. It should only be sparringly used. But there are times that it is necessary and is often better alternative than having someone hauled to county jail.

All of you who are calling for people to be locked up involuntarily for 72 hours because their behavior is “strange” are showing your authoritarian colors. If you don’t think this would be abused beyond belief, you are either naive or just don’t care.

Then what are you going to do to elevate the ability of private citizens to defend themselves? Are you willing to make a death threat tantamount to a use of force?

Human nature is a hurdle. Then again we managed to domesticate lowly yeast, first by accident and then refined its use over time through a blend of art and then science, which I would propose is one of mankind’s greatest acheivements.

I have to agree.

Not smart. Emotions were bound to be running high and things would be said that we all wish were not. The producers are frakking idiots.

Years ago, and it has been years, I wouldn’t have believed that The Agitator could be effective in shining such a potent public light on police abuse, and now it is mildly encouraging. But it is important to know that for every attack against it, moderately successful or otherwise, the dynamic State has virtually infinite resources to counter-attack, and is strengthened in the process.

There’s nothing in the world — nothing — that focuses the State or feeds it more satisfyingly than a direct challenge to its sovereignty. Direct challenge can only end three ways: destruction (e.g., John Brown’s Raid), co-option (e.g., the Civil Rights Movement), or successful overthrow, in which the old boss is replaced by an identical new boss and the cycle begins anew.

Another strategy must be adopted or the only thing achieved is playing Einstein’s Insanity Game on a grand scale. As an anarchist, I propose the abandonment of violence. Alas, as you and many, many others have beaten into me over the years, and which I finally agree to, human nature is an insurmountable barrier to this strategy.

That leaves Einstein’s Insanity Game as the only option for those who choose to remain in society. This reduces the work of The Agitator and like-minded individuals to complaining that other people (State agents and apologists and beneficiaries) play the game better.

But in the end, all anyone can do is talk to one another. This is what it’s all about — the human need for catharsis. I guess as long as people are talking, they’re probably not shooting. About as much as one could expect from hyper-cerebral apes with a penchant for tool-making.

Really, in the end, don’t humans just expect too much from one another?

I am not a complete anarchist like you, so yeah I am a pick and chooser. The state can be a beast, so can the mob. But to the extent we have a state, I would assume it be as small as possible.

But if the world was full of people like you we might be able to pull it off anarchy. Unfortunately not all are like you.

On first reading, and IANAL, it appears that people who interact directly with police officers in Illinois may still have standing to challenge the state law against wiretapping, but not a 3rd-party such as the ACLU. That leaves the door open to overturn the law.

With the “security” one gets wrong-door raids, intrusive nanny-statism, wholesale civil liberties violations, rampant taxation, and on and on and on. There’s no such thing as a minarchy. One cannot pick and choose. The only way to rein in the beast of the State is to starve it — of attention, of funding, of legitimacy, by walking away from it and living a non-violent life.

Joe: “Okay. Isn’t complaining about a law you disagree with the first step? You are the one who called them crazy. Maybe you support statist King County’s rules and regulations. If that is your position, fair enough, but that someone disagrees does not make them crazy. Some of us get why this family is upset.”

Complaining is not the same thing as working to change something. And you have me confused with someone else — I never wrote that I thought the family was crazy. Take it back, sir.

It’s the only way the status quo can continue.

#68 Gideon Darrow

Court Rejects Claim of a First Amendment Right to Audio-Record Police Officers

So, does this mean that the press no longer has the right to film and record officers in the process of reporting the news in Illinois?

If this holds up, I guaran-goddamn-ty you that all 50 states will outlaw recording the cops.

Or the bigger continuing slandering of the left by falsely claiming they are slandering the right.

Oh really. How did Limbaugh, Palin and Levin motivate Jason Loughner? Do you have any evidence of that?

http://volokh.com/2011/01/14/court-rejects-claim-of-a-first-amendment-right-to-audio-record-police-officers/

http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2011/01/maryland-greens-and-libertarians-hand-in-signatures-petitioners-harassed-one-arrested-at-public-library/

“There was another court ruling in Maryland which backed up free speech activities at public venues, that is Acorn vs. the Maryland Transit Authority (or MTA). Acorn is a group that does voter registration drives and their people were being run out of Maryland transit stops by the police and MTA workers. So they sued the MTA. The ACLU of Maryland took their case and they ended up winning.

There was also a case out of Nebraska called Groene vs. Seng which I testified in (in the form of a written deposition) that was decided in federal court. Our side (the petition circulators) won that case, and the court ruling specifically mentions libraries as being fair game for petition signature gathering.

Given that their were two relavent court rulings out of Maryland, plus the US Supreme Court ruling mentioned above and the federal court ruling Groene vs. Seng, and also considering that the Deputy Executive Director of the Howard County library system had already acknowledged that we had a legal right to be there, I figured that this issue had already been decided in our favor.

This is why I said that I’d wait and talk to the police. I figured that talking to them would clear things up. The police had no interest in listening to anything that I had to say or in reading the papers that I had or in even bothering to call their headquarters so they could look into anything that I had to say. These two police officers were highly unprofessional. The proper police procedure is that they are supposed to do an investigation. If these police officers had been doing their jobs properly they would have investigated what I had to say and they would have also observed me gathering signatures to see if I was actually doing anything wrong. They did not bother to do either. An attorney that I spoke to said that these police officers cleraly did not follow proper procedures.

I clearly told them that I was going to leave (even though they had no legal or moral right to tell me that I had to do this) but I told them that I wanted to have some documentation of them telling me that I had to leave so that I could present it to an attorney if necessary. Since they did not give me anything in writing telling me that I had to leave I told them that I wanted to record them on the video camera on my cell phone telling me that I had to leave and that I would leave after that.

It was AFTER I started trying to record them telling me that I had to leave that the police Sargent tried to rip the phone out of my hand. I held on to my phone because I did not want it to get smashed (it would have cost me over $100 to replace) and I tried to get it back in my phone case and just as I got it back in its case the police Sargent sprayed pepper spray in my eyes.

The actions of the two police officers and the librarian were blatantly unconstitutional. They should all be fired from their jobs. I’m going to fight this charge and I’m going to pursue legal action against them.”

Or the bigger continuing slandering of the left by falsely claiming they are slandering the right.