Yeah, that's my default assumption too. Plus it leaves room for them to surprise me (as was the case when one nice cop came out and helped dig out my car out of the snow). It's good to have low expectations, haha.
yea I hear that. One time one surprised me and acted very human when he could have made life miserable. But dude looked a few days from retirement and it was def close to shift change time, so I'm thinking he just didnt wanna deal with all the paperwork. Let's just say the car had a very particular smell that he could not have missed. Had no ID on me either and he never even asked my name. It was the strangest thing I ever been thru
Do you live in the USA? 1. Traffic stops are typically fund-raising tickets created and approved by your own city council. Run for City Council or begin a petition to remove tickets for running stops signs, going 50 mph in 25 mph residential neighborhood, a missing braking light, driving erratically, etc. 2. In all 50 states, a warrant is required to search either your home or your car unless a child or woman is screaming 'help me' from your trunk. Just say 'no'. 3. You can have illegal things in your home, until the police have a search warrant which is typically approved when an illegal possession threatens your neighbors.
I like many of your articles but feel this one misses the mark. P.S. I have had traffic stop harassments, most recently by the Texas Rangers when I was driving through that state. I didn't agree to a search of my car and asked the officers if they minded if I took their pictures. As soon as I took their pictures, they left me alone.
1. I don't believe in political "solutions". That's like saying "if you don't like the mafia, you should join and change it to be better from the inside". It's neither practical nor moral to try to fix government. We can go into the why more if you'd like.
2. That's maybe how it should be, but isn't how it actually is. Cops can look into your car with a flashlight, "see" something, and then decide to proceed with a search, no warrant required. This is the "plain view doctrine". Have you heard of civil asset forfeiture? That's a fun one, it'll make you pretty mad if you look at all the abuses done in the name of that.
As far as just saying no, that works sometimes, but at the end of the day, if the cop wants to drag you to jail for the night and make your life miserable, he can, and what can you do about it? Sue them? So they can get paid leave while under investigation? Because of immunity, cops can get away with all kinds of stuff. Plus there's often collusion (the thin blue line) where cops protect each other, evidence disappears, etc. The whole system is incredibly corrupt.
3. Once again, that's maybe how the system should operate, but it's not how it does. Cops conduct thousands of no-knock raids every year, often against completely innocent people. I'm sure a quick search will show you lots of examples.
Cops can get away with murder, literally, and because of a system that's corrupt by design, there's not much you can do about it. Just look at Waco and Ruby Ridge. The sniper who shot a woman and child dead is still free, never having had any consequence for murdering innocents.
When you stop viewing the system of government as a corruption of some better ideal, and instead as what it really is: a system of deliberate oppression, then things start to make more sense.
Yeah, some of governments’ theft and depredation is so naked some struggle to believe it’s real. Sometimes governments don’t bother to wrap their crimes in propaganda.
I think part of the trouble is that people have gotten used to the idea of the government as some kind of ultimate good that is the purveyor of everything. The whole taxation thing for example just doesn’t register at all: you’ve tried explaining the “tax is theft” concept, right? And doesn’t that go over well…
Yeah, the ruling classes have always come up with some kind of justification for their thieving and murdering. The more "legitimacy" you can accrue with the peasants, the less expensive it is to rule over them with force, and the more productive they are. Once they took over schooling it was game over. Now it's a real uphill battle trying to get people to wake up.
Reminds me of what Morpheus said in the Matrix to Neo: they don't wake people up past a certain age because it's too hard for them to face their reality. The more propaganda you have to undo, the harder it is to get through to somebody.
Very true but it seems like these days we’ve reached a point where the thieving and murdering isn’t even called that anymore. For a feudal peasant, he might not question the fact that his lord is robbing, but at least there is no confusion on whether he is being robbed or not.
Some march for abortion, others feel the death penalty is justified, even worse the choice of "euthanasia" which is just suicide at the hands of another. Until a society agrees to a core set of principles such as "all human life is sacred", there will be ever-growing abuses by those in control of law and punishment. People are inherently evil, no matter how sweet they might talk. Most libertarians and "anarchists" I have held discussions with, seem to be naive of the basic selfishness of every individual.
I disagree that people are inherently evil. Do you have children? Were they born evil? Mine weren't. I think most people are pretty much in the middle - they don't have a very strong moral compass, they'll do good when it's easy to do good, and when the incentives flip they might do bad. That's selfishness but I wouldn't necessarily call that evil. Most of those people in the middle have limits as to have far they would go, and it takes a lot to push most people to do evil. Have you seen those reports from WWI about how most soldiers would shoot above their enemies' heads? That's why they introduced psychological warfare in basic training, to try to kill that inherent goodness in most people so that they'd commit murder when told to.
Then there's the people on either side of the bell curve - the truly evil, and the good people. Good people will go out of their way to do good no matter what the incentives are because they have a strong moral compass. Evil people will always do evil no matter what, even if it means ending up in prison - they can't help it, that's just what psychopathy is.
I think selfishness, when harnessed in a free market economy, can be extremely beneficial - you just need to align everyone's incentives so that one person's selfishness benefits others. That's what the invisible hand is.
If you go around equating selfishness with evil you're going to be pretty disappointed in society and end up at a dead end, IMO.
So, if people are "good" why the hate towards police officers? Why not just cooperate with traffic stops and consider it a cost of living in a society? I think COVID pretty much revealed the inherent evil in people around the globe, especially political leaders. But we each have different life experiences.
Well, police officers exist in a world of perverse incentives. They have "immunity" from prosecution that makes it very difficult to convict a cop of wrongdoing, they're paid by taxpayers who are stolen from (taxed) at the point of a gun, and they're asked to enforce laws that are wrong on the face of it (e.g. all the drug-related arrests).
So what ends up happening is while both good and bad people join the police force, the good ones typically quit within a couple of years. I know former cops like this - they saw what the job was really like (abuse of power, corruption, etc.) and quit. That leaves only the bad apples behind. Plus, the nature of police work tends to attract bad people to begin with. A lot of people know that cops can get away with anything and lord it over others, and join precisely for that reason.
So while the majority of regular people are not evil, I would think that the majority of cops are, or at least that's the trend over time.
There is a general trend in organizations that either good or bad people tend to push out the rest so over time organizations will become less diverse (in terms of their moral compass). It's like applying Gresham's Law to ethics.
Google is another example - most of the engineers who had a moral compass and were against Google censoring, or making AI targeting software for military drones, end up protesting and quitting or getting fired. Eventually you just have the moral relativists or evil ones left behind and then the organization has less internal resistance to wrongdoing.
As far as COVID - I was very disappointed by the average reaction of people to the masking, vaccine mandates, etc. but, and I don't mean to defend the sheep that went along with all of this, there was an incredibly strong propaganda push and psyop to accomplish the level of compliance they did. There were professional "nudge units" (as they were called in the UK) in many countries trying to figure out exactly how to brainwash people into compliance. This was calculated, planned, and massive in scope. I think keeping that context in mind helps.
All drug possession arrests are not incorrect. Should pushers and peer groups be allowed to shame/peer pressure others into addiction and overdose. Should parents, or siblings be allowed to overdose children just because they are allowed to possess drugs in lethal doses.
IMHO:
Most federal and state power should be returned to smaller communities, perhaps with a maximum population size of 250K or so. Then communities can decide how to be taxed, if at all. How to provide healthcare and/or support related research. How to educate the next generation, etc.
Sure. Let's say you're driving on 3rd street in your car and you come to a four way light. You want to turn left onto 5th avenue. Just as your light turns green you notice a big fuckin bus flying down 5th avenue at high speed. The driver obviously has no intention of slowing down.
So, now you have a true philosophical choice;
Do you wait for the bus to go through the intersection and miss the light or;
Do you stand on principle, knowing you have every moral right to go through that light, make the turn and let the bus plow into you?
safe to assume if the uniform is on, that the cop is, has been, or is about to, do something wrong.
Yeah, that's my default assumption too. Plus it leaves room for them to surprise me (as was the case when one nice cop came out and helped dig out my car out of the snow). It's good to have low expectations, haha.
yea I hear that. One time one surprised me and acted very human when he could have made life miserable. But dude looked a few days from retirement and it was def close to shift change time, so I'm thinking he just didnt wanna deal with all the paperwork. Let's just say the car had a very particular smell that he could not have missed. Had no ID on me either and he never even asked my name. It was the strangest thing I ever been thru
Sounds like you lucked out!
very very much so.
The complexity of modern law is no mistake. It's designed to crush decent if need be. There's even a book about it.
Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229
If they want your ass in prison, and you’re not already very wealthy, you’ll end up there.
Is he breathing? Then he either just did something wrong, or is looking forward to doing something wrong.
Fucking Pig.
Easy. They're cops.
Do you live in the USA? 1. Traffic stops are typically fund-raising tickets created and approved by your own city council. Run for City Council or begin a petition to remove tickets for running stops signs, going 50 mph in 25 mph residential neighborhood, a missing braking light, driving erratically, etc. 2. In all 50 states, a warrant is required to search either your home or your car unless a child or woman is screaming 'help me' from your trunk. Just say 'no'. 3. You can have illegal things in your home, until the police have a search warrant which is typically approved when an illegal possession threatens your neighbors.
I like many of your articles but feel this one misses the mark. P.S. I have had traffic stop harassments, most recently by the Texas Rangers when I was driving through that state. I didn't agree to a search of my car and asked the officers if they minded if I took their pictures. As soon as I took their pictures, they left me alone.
I do, yes.
1. I don't believe in political "solutions". That's like saying "if you don't like the mafia, you should join and change it to be better from the inside". It's neither practical nor moral to try to fix government. We can go into the why more if you'd like.
2. That's maybe how it should be, but isn't how it actually is. Cops can look into your car with a flashlight, "see" something, and then decide to proceed with a search, no warrant required. This is the "plain view doctrine". Have you heard of civil asset forfeiture? That's a fun one, it'll make you pretty mad if you look at all the abuses done in the name of that.
As far as just saying no, that works sometimes, but at the end of the day, if the cop wants to drag you to jail for the night and make your life miserable, he can, and what can you do about it? Sue them? So they can get paid leave while under investigation? Because of immunity, cops can get away with all kinds of stuff. Plus there's often collusion (the thin blue line) where cops protect each other, evidence disappears, etc. The whole system is incredibly corrupt.
3. Once again, that's maybe how the system should operate, but it's not how it does. Cops conduct thousands of no-knock raids every year, often against completely innocent people. I'm sure a quick search will show you lots of examples.
Cops can get away with murder, literally, and because of a system that's corrupt by design, there's not much you can do about it. Just look at Waco and Ruby Ridge. The sniper who shot a woman and child dead is still free, never having had any consequence for murdering innocents.
When you stop viewing the system of government as a corruption of some better ideal, and instead as what it really is: a system of deliberate oppression, then things start to make more sense.
"Have you heard of civil asset forfeiture?"
A favorite of mine: I put it into a story for kids I'm writing and then actually had to convince a reader who emailed to tell me it was impossible.
Yeah, some of governments’ theft and depredation is so naked some struggle to believe it’s real. Sometimes governments don’t bother to wrap their crimes in propaganda.
I think part of the trouble is that people have gotten used to the idea of the government as some kind of ultimate good that is the purveyor of everything. The whole taxation thing for example just doesn’t register at all: you’ve tried explaining the “tax is theft” concept, right? And doesn’t that go over well…
Yeah, the ruling classes have always come up with some kind of justification for their thieving and murdering. The more "legitimacy" you can accrue with the peasants, the less expensive it is to rule over them with force, and the more productive they are. Once they took over schooling it was game over. Now it's a real uphill battle trying to get people to wake up.
Reminds me of what Morpheus said in the Matrix to Neo: they don't wake people up past a certain age because it's too hard for them to face their reality. The more propaganda you have to undo, the harder it is to get through to somebody.
Very true but it seems like these days we’ve reached a point where the thieving and murdering isn’t even called that anymore. For a feudal peasant, he might not question the fact that his lord is robbing, but at least there is no confusion on whether he is being robbed or not.
Would love to read your story by the way!
Kind of you to say so :) It’s really for kids but here you go, that’s the first one in the series: https://substack.com/@flyovervalley/p-139102611
Thanks for sharing! I have kids so always on the lookout for good kid stories.
I hope they enjoy it then! It’s the first one I’ve properly written down so any feedback is like gold (real gold, not the bankster promise of gold).
Some march for abortion, others feel the death penalty is justified, even worse the choice of "euthanasia" which is just suicide at the hands of another. Until a society agrees to a core set of principles such as "all human life is sacred", there will be ever-growing abuses by those in control of law and punishment. People are inherently evil, no matter how sweet they might talk. Most libertarians and "anarchists" I have held discussions with, seem to be naive of the basic selfishness of every individual.
I disagree that people are inherently evil. Do you have children? Were they born evil? Mine weren't. I think most people are pretty much in the middle - they don't have a very strong moral compass, they'll do good when it's easy to do good, and when the incentives flip they might do bad. That's selfishness but I wouldn't necessarily call that evil. Most of those people in the middle have limits as to have far they would go, and it takes a lot to push most people to do evil. Have you seen those reports from WWI about how most soldiers would shoot above their enemies' heads? That's why they introduced psychological warfare in basic training, to try to kill that inherent goodness in most people so that they'd commit murder when told to.
Then there's the people on either side of the bell curve - the truly evil, and the good people. Good people will go out of their way to do good no matter what the incentives are because they have a strong moral compass. Evil people will always do evil no matter what, even if it means ending up in prison - they can't help it, that's just what psychopathy is.
I think selfishness, when harnessed in a free market economy, can be extremely beneficial - you just need to align everyone's incentives so that one person's selfishness benefits others. That's what the invisible hand is.
If you go around equating selfishness with evil you're going to be pretty disappointed in society and end up at a dead end, IMO.
So, if people are "good" why the hate towards police officers? Why not just cooperate with traffic stops and consider it a cost of living in a society? I think COVID pretty much revealed the inherent evil in people around the globe, especially political leaders. But we each have different life experiences.
Well, police officers exist in a world of perverse incentives. They have "immunity" from prosecution that makes it very difficult to convict a cop of wrongdoing, they're paid by taxpayers who are stolen from (taxed) at the point of a gun, and they're asked to enforce laws that are wrong on the face of it (e.g. all the drug-related arrests).
So what ends up happening is while both good and bad people join the police force, the good ones typically quit within a couple of years. I know former cops like this - they saw what the job was really like (abuse of power, corruption, etc.) and quit. That leaves only the bad apples behind. Plus, the nature of police work tends to attract bad people to begin with. A lot of people know that cops can get away with anything and lord it over others, and join precisely for that reason.
So while the majority of regular people are not evil, I would think that the majority of cops are, or at least that's the trend over time.
There is a general trend in organizations that either good or bad people tend to push out the rest so over time organizations will become less diverse (in terms of their moral compass). It's like applying Gresham's Law to ethics.
Google is another example - most of the engineers who had a moral compass and were against Google censoring, or making AI targeting software for military drones, end up protesting and quitting or getting fired. Eventually you just have the moral relativists or evil ones left behind and then the organization has less internal resistance to wrongdoing.
As far as COVID - I was very disappointed by the average reaction of people to the masking, vaccine mandates, etc. but, and I don't mean to defend the sheep that went along with all of this, there was an incredibly strong propaganda push and psyop to accomplish the level of compliance they did. There were professional "nudge units" (as they were called in the UK) in many countries trying to figure out exactly how to brainwash people into compliance. This was calculated, planned, and massive in scope. I think keeping that context in mind helps.
I've previously written an article about my growth to viewing people as evil. Here's a link if you care for the thought process behind it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/edsharrow/p/you-are-evil?r=xmzgz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
All drug possession arrests are not incorrect. Should pushers and peer groups be allowed to shame/peer pressure others into addiction and overdose. Should parents, or siblings be allowed to overdose children just because they are allowed to possess drugs in lethal doses.
IMHO:
Most federal and state power should be returned to smaller communities, perhaps with a maximum population size of 250K or so. Then communities can decide how to be taxed, if at all. How to provide healthcare and/or support related research. How to educate the next generation, etc.
The very harassment is the problem..not the result.
Maybe they just wanted their pictures taken and were too shy to ask?
I agree in principle. However, the gap between what is morally correct and what is practical in each situation can be enormous.
Can you provide an example?
Sure. Let's say you're driving on 3rd street in your car and you come to a four way light. You want to turn left onto 5th avenue. Just as your light turns green you notice a big fuckin bus flying down 5th avenue at high speed. The driver obviously has no intention of slowing down.
So, now you have a true philosophical choice;
Do you wait for the bus to go through the intersection and miss the light or;
Do you stand on principle, knowing you have every moral right to go through that light, make the turn and let the bus plow into you?