Ray Marshall wrote:
We live in a country where the law is deemed sacred and must be observed.
Sez who?
Even while seemingly doing our best, we sometimes make really dumb laws.
Maybe that's even the case for 50% of the laws. For example, it was
fewer than three years ago, I think, that MN finally removed from the
books a state law saying it was a punishable offense to leave this state
wearing a duck on your head. You may not have known that law, since it
would never have occurred to you to leave the state wearing a duck on
your head. We're talking real ducks here, dead or alive, not plush toys
or funny hats.
Further, we have several types of laws. In MN we run heavy to the nanny
laws. It is actually impossible to get up in the morning, take on the
day, and go back to bed without deliberately or accidentally going afoul
of the law. There are so many laws, no one knows them all, including
police, jurists, legislators of all stripes. As an ordinary Joe or Jo,
you haven't got a snowball's chance of knowing them all. But that's no
excuse...under the law.
Thus, hundreds or more die and suffer because it is "against the law" for a
soldier to provide law enforcement domestically.
If it's all the same to you, I'd kinda like to keep this one in place.
I'm fairly certain it was added to the legal magnum opus to keep us from
devolving into what's known as a 'tin pot dictatorship,' a.k.a. 'a
banana republic.' And don't kid yourself, we're only a hair away from
that at all times.
Yet state and local police and public employees are ordered under threat of
losing their jobs that they are not to enforce the law making it a crime to
be in this country without proper documentation.
Man, you are stepping into really deep waters here. Actually, city
police are in no way organized or funded well enough to take on a task
with such vast requirements. That's why someone invented the INS, a
federal task. However, La Migra does not apply that law even- handedly.
There are a zillion Irish men and women here without a green card. There
are Brits without green cards. I would venture to say that there are
Western Europeans of assorted stripe without green cards. I've never
heard a story of one being given the boot, unless a specific country
asked for the person and even then not always. Cubans come in by the
boatload, if the boats make it, and we welcome them with open arms
because we decided to make Fidel the boogy man. I believe we're honked
at Fidel still because he tossed the mafia back on us rather than put up
with them down there.
From another thread this week, apparently, I can steal stuff from unlocked
cars without any worry about being arrested.
That's always been true. The caveat is don't get caught. The thing that
honked off Shegstad (apparently this guy is way into normal on the human
scale of such things) was the effrontery with which they did it in broad
daylight. So long as a cop didn't eyeball the window being smashed and
the radio being removed, the cops are stuck with loitering with intent
or lurking with evil intentions or some such as a reason to arrest.
Excuse me? I got out to the alley or the sidewalk cause there are a
bunch of noisy doofs standing around loud talking and acting the fool.
At that moment, I'm lurking with evil intent. I wanna tell them off and
call their parentage and upbringing into question. You want a cop to
take me to jail for that? How will that improve my respect for the cop's
authority? Or the rule of law?
I think it's interesting that the man who observed this behavior decided
immediately to call the cops. He couldn't go down the alley and ask them
what they were up to? Or opine that they needed to Keep steppin and find
another form of entertainment?
It would be nice to know which laws I have to observe, and which I don't
have to worry about.
Well, it depends. If yer feelthy reech, pretty much the sky's the limit.
If you're upper middle class and pulled something really boneheaded and
violent, the courts might slap your hand and give you some consequences
for poor form. If you're petit bourgeois, you'll get consequences of a
doable nature, though if you resort to violence against someone other
than your spouse, you'll do time. That could change if you pull some
white collar crime badly and the district attorney has a bigger
political career in mind. But if you're poor, they'll slam you,
particularly if you're stupid to boot, arrogant and diffident with a
foul mouth. It's goes double if you are known to the beat cops as a
royal pain in the neck to all and sundry, themselves included. Unless,
of course, you can claim chronic inebriation so you can run through the
social service system hoops instead. That's if you're caucasian, born
and bred here. There are regional variations on this theme. If you are
not caucasian, it's a whole nuther ball game.
WizardMarks, Central
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