this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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That's a current picture, not a future picture.
Our first amendment rights are only exercisable with the permission of the government, preferably in silence tucked away where no one can see us.
Our third amendment rights are non-existent because SCOTUS draws a line between the police and soldiers. (Never mind the British soldiers were here to police the colonies)
Our Fourth amendment rights exist only notionally. If officers get a dog to jump at your car or have a "good faith belief" that they're within their rights to search.
Fifth is almost just gone. Civil Asset Forfeiture means only the rich can afford to keep the state from taking their stuff at any time. States routinely re-run criminal trials by deliberately getting a mistrial declared if they're losing.
The sixth is a joke. Public defenders in some places have as little as 7 minutes to look at your case. And if you're accused of a misdemeanor you probably won't have a jury at all. But you will lose your job, your house, and everything else in a chain reaction as you have to figure out how to pay hefty fines with no job. Also you'll probably end up in prison for contempt of court when you have trouble paying.
The eighth amendment is likewise a joke. Instead of protecting poor people in the system, it's used as a cudgel to force confessions.
And this is all on top of decades of wealth transfer out of the working class to the point that it's getting hard to buy food for half the country.
Oh yeah, Trump would be horrible. But he's the guy we've been getting set up for, not the guy the establishment is trying to avoid. I'll probably vote for Biden but I'm not going to be surprised when the "status quo genocide" guy gets his ass handed to him. Democrats needed to fight for this and they just aren't.
Edit to add - Y'all know the second the GOP puts up a reasonable sounding asshole we're fucked right? Like if Nikki Haley got the nomination? All that pressure drops away and she'd still institute project 2025 just like Trump.
Dems just aren't; it all seems so lacking any urgency.
Excellent writeup
It's a so-so writeup, and you are likely not getting it.
You forgot your 2nd amendment, which gives y'all the right to arm yourselves in case the government is working against the people. Which with the way things have changed since it was written, basically allows you to bring knives to a gun fight. Your government has tanks and fighter jets and aircraft carriers, but sure - pencildick Jim Bob's collection of 30 glocks will be really useful against even one drone.
Yeah, your Republicans have been systematically shitting on your country with almost no reaction from your Democrats and some people sit there, covered in shit up to their eyes, breathing through a straw, and still somehow find it in them to say "vote Republican, this shit doesn't even smell" or "vote Democrat otherwise they'll take the biggest dump so far". I mean, come on. Find another option already.
Oh I didn't forget about it. It's just broken the other way right now.
And I agree that we need another option. Unfortunately the choices seem to be a party that wants corporations to just take the mask off and actually run the country and an eco party that's been largely co-opted by the Russians.
Progressives are still working inside the DNC but they keep getting stepped on by the donor class because the liberals routinely fall for tech billionaires who profess progressive ideals but only if we hand them a ton of money. So the liberals hand the money to the billionaires instead of actual progressives. Which just ends up furthering private governance.
Trump is a Russian asset.
Well yeah.
The third? Quarter police? How is that being infringed on?
So first thing to know is SCOTUS ruled the third amendment does not apply to police. Because the amendment literally says "soldier". Seems simple enough right?
The problem is we didn't have the concept of police back then that we have now. And the problem the amendment is addressing is the forced quartering of British Soldiers in homes during the American Revolution and the years leading up to it. To be clear, the consent of the homeowner was not required, some loyalists obviously welcomed it. But the majority did not and there were serious problems with it such as the soldiers considering everything in the house to be fair game, from the food to the daughters.
Now the crucial point is that policing back then was a sentry system. Citizens in good standing took turns on night watch and if they ran into a problem they would use a noisemaker like a whistle to call out anyone willing to help. This obviously is no good to the British and loyal colonial governments when the people are beginning to turn away from Britain.
So they got a few thousand British Soldiers in to do the job "properly" and they needed somewhere to house them.
So when the amendment was written, the word "police" wasn't in large use yet. (it takes off as we know it in the early 1800's) They didn't think a citizen in good standing would need to take over a house, that kind of policing wasn't even dreamed of, except as a measure of a military occupation. So they wrote in plain language as they knew it.
The intent was always to make sure the government couldn't force you to house it's agents. Now in modern times we have cases where police force people out of their homes to conduct surveillance on their neighbors.
In even more fun, the third and fourth amendments are where we get our right to privacy. If the government isn't allowed to force itself into your home without a probable cause warrant then the right to privacy must be inferred. But with the recent Roe ruling and the state laws expanding the definition of a person based on religion (first amendment) we have some serious violations of privacy going on now as well.
Basically, we have the rights the police and conservative elite allow us to have, and not the rights enumerated to use by the Constitution. They may look the same, but they aren't, and they change depending on how much money you have, the color of your skin, and who you know.
You know that was all you need to write. Everything before that was unnecessary, sorry to say, rambling.
And after that was going pretty quickly to conspiracy theories.
Obviously not since the biggest argument against enforcing the 3rd amendment against the police is the very semantics I talk about.
And we demonstrably do not have the rights the Constitution says we should have. So where do the rights we do have come from? Well the police and justice system have broad power to ignore the Constitution, so they and the political power behind them must be the actual arbiter of our rights. It's not hard to put that equation together. Nobody is out here saying there's a shadow cabal or a world government. Just a shitty reality.
It's an interesting thought but you'd be more convincing if you didn't ramble incessantly and then go to conspiracy theories.
So what exactly do you think is the conspiracy here? What's the crime, who's the group, where do they meet, why are they conspiring?
You know how you get all of those rights back?
The second.
Except that what passes for the left in the US is terrified of actually exercising that right in order to get the other ones back.
(PS - 1A rights in re: religion are fully exercisable, as long as you are white and evangelical.)
Buddy, if you picked up a rifle to take down the system you'd just end up with a tank staring back. Guns aren't going to get us out of this.
This thread is MF weird.
That entirely depends on how many people pick up a rifle. One person? Yeah, it's Chinese repression of democracy all over. 1M people? Nah, the gov't gets overthrown.
You need more like 18 million. The stats on insurgencies are 10 percent supporting and 1 percent acting. And supporting isn't just in theory, these are stash houses, escape routes, and weapons builders. But that's just to get started. You need to convince a majority of people otherwise when you actually try to march in the open the military will just crush you.
That seemed to be the plan once before. That didn't work out so well for the people who tried it.
I think it was some time around January 6th.
Insufficient people, insufficient support. You need more than 10,000 people to win a revolution in a country of 340,000,000. And 6 January was really close; if they'd actually been armed--and the overwhelming majority were not--it would have been very, very different.
under no pretext
100%.
And, BTW, I see that as an individual right, not a collective right.
This is a thread full of one person talking to himself. TF.