sp3ctr4l

Oh my god it is supposed to be off color and impolite.

Do you somehow think Swasticar is not off color nor impolite?

And yes, thank you for your permission, sir/madam/yourhonorificofchoice, to allow me, an Anarchist, to continue to do whatever the fuck I want, thank you so much, I needed permission.

Are you, as well, entirely unaware of the hyper racist history of Afrikaners, as well as their current, still existing, pretty fucking extreme amounts of racism?

I've known Germans, exchange students, who can laugh along with an obviously in jest Nazi themed/jab at them. Hell, they'd make the jokes themselves first, and then quickly become extremely serious and say 'no but for real all that shit was extremely bad'.

I, as a white American, can laugh along when a Native American friend gets a bit miffed at me and makes a joke about me giving him beads for gold, or something to that effect... I can also laugh when I tell a Black friend I love this old blues guitar artist so much its inspired me to try out the style on my guitar, and he says 'hey as long as you don't steal all the credit.'

Fuck man, half my cousins are Jewish and they are absolutely the masters of making basically racist stereotype jokes against themselves, totally unprompted.

If I couldn't laugh at those things, if the German exchange student couldn't laugh at the Nazi jests... that, that is what would indicate there may be some deep rooted insecurity stemming from not coming to grips with ... history, and being able to laugh at its follies.

Oh right and of course there's also Italian Americans... I am significantly of Italian American heritage, and most of us just unironically love all the Italian American jokes and such, even though the actual Italians and Sicillians have basicslly disowned us at this point rofl.

Many of my Latino friends as well just unironically laugh along with many of the Latino characterizations and jokes... I think you can look up some articles, with polling data backing them, on how like, most Latinos actually do just think Speedy Gonzales is awesome (though of course 'Slow Lopez' is MUCH less well recieved), and how the Yo Quiero Taco Bell chihuahua was actually quite popular, but basically cancelled by white people being afraid of appearing/promoting racist tropes.

You can literally just ask people what they do and do not find offensive, instead of taking on your white man's burden of having to do all that white-knight, racism protection on your own, without any actual input from who you are 'protecting'.

Even most of the Brits I uses to know would make self-aware, self-degrading imperialism jokes.

...

If you are an Afrikaner and the AfrikanerKar actually offends you, chances are you're a racist and you're telling on yourself.

If you are a not racist Afrikaner, chances are you'd appreciate the pun and throw in some other self-aware joke or disown Elon in some way.

If you're not an Afrikaner, and you're offended on behalf of a hypothetical percieved possible racism experienced by a hypothetical person, well that's the definition of performative outrage, tone policing... and also assumes you understand other people's perception of what is and is not racist better than they do.

Uh... are... you at all familiar with the history of Eastern Asia?

Do... you know a good number of people from varying Asian backgrounds?

The (South) Koreans and Japanese and Chinese (who are of course many different ethnic groups, but for this example, lets simplify) are very, very often, very racist towards each other, and the Japanese ... actions during WW2... are still extremely fresh and present in the minds of many Koreans and Chinese.

I used to date a woman who was half Korean and half Vietnamese, and most of the Korean side of her family routinely referred to her as a term roughly equivalent to 'half breed' or 'mulatto'.

Even within say, Japan, you'll get fairer skinned Japanese basically being racist against more tan Japanese.

I used to know a half Japanese, half Filipino guy who got racist shit thrown at him all the time by both sides.

I am also friends with a woman from Singapore, who is ethnically Malay, and she'd tell me about all the times she got racism slung her way by other ethnic groups, how the native Malays are largely an underclass now... these were fairly major factors in her deciding to migrate to Canada.

... White people may be the all time historical top scorers in terms of racist genocide kill counts... but racist genocides and horrendous mistreatment are far from unique, presently or historically, to white people.

I mean shit... are Israelis white, rofl?

If you as uh, this guy, the answer is apparently no?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/miami-man-arrested-after-shooting-2-men-mistakenly/story?id=118943165

The Israelis are certainly aiming to get as high up as they can on that all time racist genocide kill count leaderboard.

I am saying plainclothes officers are absolutely a form of secret police, and regular police are arguably a form of secret police.

Ah, good! We agree on that then =D

You are correct it's all just word games, but it's a game that seems to have you pretty riled up. Why?

I have a degree in Poli Sci and have written papers (as course work, not academically published in journals) on topics like this.

Beyond that, I'm Autistic, a bit of a stickler for details, and enjoy infodumping.

... And I am currently physically maimed, will probably be more or less bedridden for the next 6 months or so, aside from Physical Therapy appointments... so I have arguably too much free time.

So, I didn't give a new definition of secret police.

The original commenter gave a definition, you commented on that definition, I commented on your comment.

And with the original definition, the part that you highlighted, that secret police agencies have been given legal authority or priveleges that allow them to effectively ignore or be largely immune to many other laws....

Basically yes, obviously, that is indeed how it has been for a long time.

Basically all policing bodies in the US have historically and currently have to ability to operate with a level of undercover secrecy.

General police in the US have had qualified immunity, ability to do civil asset foreitures with no accountability... tons of other legal priveleges and leeway exceeding that of most other citizens for... longer than I've been alive.

All that is happening now is that certain law enforcement bodies are having even more legal limitations removed, legal protections added, either de facto or de jure.

...

Am I missing something?

Are you saying anything more than... certain law enforcement agencies are legally permitted and allowed to not play by the same rules as everyone else?

Are you under the false impression that that has ever not been the case?

...

It is totally sophormoric to point out that a law can be passed or an order can be given to allow certain people to not be held to certain other laws, thus what those certain special people do is legal, so they're not technically criminals.

This is basically just word games.

The actual interesting part is the power differential between the different legal classes of people, who watches the watchers, how is oversight done, is this ethical, what should be done to remove loopholes like this, what should be done to remove the ability to create loopholes like this, etc.

...

If you pass a law or give an order that effectively says 'all other laws don't apply to this group of people', and then the rest of the legal system, even if it decides that law is unconstitional, is illegal...

If the rest of the legal system cannot actually get that special group of people to respect their bounded, limited powers, with the 'no laws apply to you' law declared null and void...

Then it doesn't matter what the rest of the legal system thinks, it doesn't matter what 'legal' and 'illegal' even mean, because their very meanings are now contentious and only enforceable by naked, unaccountable powerful groups or persons who will essentially just personally decide what legal reasoning they agree with, thus making the entire legal system effectively neutered on that level.

'De facto' means roughly 'in actual practice' or 'effectively', whereas 'de jure' means 'explicitly spelled out in the letter of the law, the orders of a judge, etc.'

If there is a law that says 'cryptocurrencies are all banned', but there are no penalties for using or holding them, no enforcement agency in charge of finding and prosecuting cryptocurrency users...

Then crypto is 'de jure' illegal, but it is 'de facto' legal.

Like, we have lots and lots of tax laws, but the IRS basically never enforces all the relevant ones against very wealthy people.

Thus, for very wealthy people, much tax evasion and many forms of fraud are 'de facto' legal, despite being 'de jure' illegal.

In semirelated news, I called a Swasticar an AfrikanerKar recently, and somehow attracted a person dedicated to explaining to me how me using such a term is actually gross and racist and I should feel bad about it.

?????

I would like to point out that many different law enforcement agencies, of many kinds, in the US, use plainclothes officers.

ICE, FBI, ATF, DEA, etc etc... Pick any agency you want, or a local police department, or a large urban metro one, or a county one, or the state patrol, or the US Marshalls... probably literally all of them historically have used plainclothes agents at one point or another, used them for surveillance and HUMINT, even used them for arrests, sometimes with fairly heavy armanents and in large numbers, planted informants in organizations, etc.

While the meme here is clumsy by way of just contrasting 'plainclothes' vs 'secret police'... plainclothes agents are essentially a tactic, which certainly often is used by 'secret police', agencies that meet your definition.

I get the line you are drawing, and it is a useful one, but unfortunately the situation is not that simple.

Fuck, a plainclothes 'secret shopper' often acts as a neutered kind of security guard for loss prevention at a supermarket or w/e, though of course they don't have any jurisdiction beyond the property.

What you mean is that a 'secret police' is legally allowed to not have to follow laws that normally apply to other citizens or government agents, and thus, they are operating legally.

This is correct.

It is also correct that the secret police essentially become a class unbound by laws that apply to others, normally, and that this distinguishes them from other classes of people.

Mhm, yep.

Yep, these are both correct, if you have a secret police, your society has another tier, another class of people with anothet set of legal rights and responsibilities.

Historically, that is quite common, with women often having far fewer legal rights, with slaves or various underclasses having less rights, yep yep yep.

All of that is and was 'legal' by the legal standards of those societies.

In theory, yes.

In practice, 'its legally complicated' and 'what have you done for me lately' and 'you and what army?'

Governments work untill they don't.

We are currently in a Constitutional crisis, a coup, a fascist takeover, call it what you will.

In this situation, some of, or maybe even all of the laws and rules and norms operate by Whose Line Is It Anyway standards: The rules are made up and the points don't matter.

The fun part is that theres no real way to predict precisely which rules and norms will matter, in what contexts, when, both as a citizen or subject of a government, or as some kind of official or representative acting within it.

Yeah wow great.

What a goddamn headline.

Oh no its fine you see, flying through an actively radioactive cloud/plume is uh... uh, maybe, technically allowable, therefore perfectly safe =D

Holy dear lord this species is actively Great Filtering itself in realtime, what an era to be alive in.

Yep, was gonna say this, at least if you're on linux.

A bit of a confusing UI, but it doesn't seem to be as resource intensive as other editors with similar feature sets.

(Though I do have very little experience with video editors/editing in general... shotcut 'clicked' for me after a few hours of just brute force fucking about with no manual or anything)