It's Not Alabama This Time, Ladies and Gentlemen!

[Dalty]

Is it as shit as American chocolate?

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

i wouldn't go that far.

[Dalty]

Meth or chocolate, meth or chocolate. Hmmmmmmmmm......

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

California Lawyer Files Papers for "Sodomite Suppression Act" to Save State from "God’s Just Wrath"

This is apparently a real thing. You can see a PDF of the filing on the .gov website for the State of California Department of Justice Office of the Attorney General.

Here are some highlights from the PDF:

Seeing that it is better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God's just wrath against us for the folly of tolerating-wickedness in our midst, the People of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.

No person shall distribute, perform, or transmit sodomistic propaganda directly or indirectly by any means to any person under the age of majority. Sodomistic propaganda is defined as anything aimed at creating an interest in or an acceptance of human sexual relations other than between a man and a woman. Every offender shall be fined $1 million per occurrence, and/or imprisoned up to 10 years, and/or expelled from the boundaries of the state of California for up to life.

The state has an affirmative duty to defend and enforce this law as written, and every member of the public has standing to seek its enforcement and obtain reimbursement for all costs and attorney's fees in so doing, and further, should the state persist in inaction over 1 year after due notice, the general public is empowered and deputized to execute all the provisions hereunder extra-judicially, immune from any charge and indemnified by the state against any and all liability.

[Mal Shot First]

No person shall distribute, perform, or transmit sodomistic propaganda directly or indirectly by any means to any person under the age of majority. Sodomistic propaganda is defined as anything aimed at creating an interest in or an acceptance of human sexual relations other than between a man and a woman. Every offender shall be fined $1 million per occurrence, and/or imprisoned up to 10 years, and/or expelled from the boundaries of the state of California for up to life.

I wonder how flexible their definitions of "man" and "woman" are. Would they include transsexual or transgender people? Something tells me they would not.

[Dalty]

Especially in California. San Fernando Valley. Home of the world's biggest Adult industry of all flavours and genders. Hell of a time enforcing that!

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Coca Cola Recalls "Good Old Times" of Nazi Rule in Germany

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

[Dalty]

I don't care what you say, the German language will always sound slightly sinister.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Man's "World Destroyed" after San Diego Cop Kills Burberry the Service Dog

[Dalty]

There really is something deeply wrong with your police force.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I want to say it's all due to power trippin', but I'm sure there's more to it than that.

I'm at the age, now, where the classmates of mine who became cops are moving into senior/somewhat powerful positions in law enforcement. Before this, I only had a vague idea of what career cops were like in their lives before becoming cops. (I say this despite descending from a long line of people in law enforcement.)

The people I know who have become cops all played (American) football. They were all mid-range students of mid-range academic ability. To the best of my knowledge, none of them was a slacker genius with just OK grades or a studious idiot with just OK grades. They're a mix of democrat and republican, but that doesn't mean much when you consider the southern-style democrat and the South in general. They weren't quite popular in school, but they weren't quite unpopular, either. They were similar, by and large, to the classmates of mine who went into the military. (I don't think there was any crossover with my specific classmates, but I'm told it's not uncommon for an enlistee whose six years are up to go into law enforcement.)

They were all slightly athletic, middle-of-the-road sorts who didn't go on to higher education. They all seemed to have something they wanted to prove. I guess that's what I'm saying. A lot of people in my class were like that, though.

They've also all gotten fat. Only one of them was fat in high school. I would describe the others as having been skinnier than average. Don't know if that plays into anything. Probably not. Fucking everyone gets fat in the south.

My experience in this regard doesn't extend beyond a very narrow age group and a very specific region. This probably goes without saying. I highly doubt what appears to be true for a certain age group in northeastern Alabama is true of the rest of the US.

[Dalty]

Really, because it appears that you take people who ordinarily wouldn't be allowed to use a pair of scissors unsupervised and you give them a gun and tell them they are a big fucking deal.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

The people of the US are, in general, a pretty poorly educated lot. You know this.

[Dalty]

Most evidence to the contrary. Plus you have some of the best Universities, engineering and scientific excellence, an ingrained work ethic (to the outsider) and are generally so,e of the nicest, friendliest, inquisitive and most welcoming people on the planet. Plus have a sense of adventure coupled with a 'can-do' attitude and a positive outlook.

You just appear to choose your guardians poorly.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Most of them were good. Zoe Saldana maybe wasn't the most interesting choice, but the rest were pretty great.

[Space Tycoon]

We've been comparatively fortunate up here wrt police, for the most part. Not exactly flawless, but not evil.

[Dalty]

My experience of the U.S. police is clearly much more limited than most of you, being based on experience from trips and a short time living there. However there is something very different about them from the rest of the so-called 'Western and Civilised' world that profess to share the same broad values.

I struggled to put my finger on it, but I think it's this. In the rest of those places the police enforce the law from the bottom up, policing by consent from the broad base of the population who subscribe to the need for an ordered society and the place of the police to provide that (as mentioned, by consent).

In the US it seems to very much be a top-down arrangement. Not consent but de-facto authority.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Officials: Missing Man Hanged Using Bed Sheets

[Mal Shot First]

I struggled to put my finger on it, but I think it's this. In the rest of those places the police enforce the law from the bottom up, policing by consent from the broad base of the population who subscribe to the need for an ordered society and the place of the police to provide that (as mentioned, by consent).

In the US it seems to very much be a top-down arrangement. Not consent but de-facto authority.

This may be the case (it's certainly my impression of the attitude toward the police force in Germany), but there also seems to exist a cross-cultural stereotype of the dumb police officer, thus suggesting that most societies are not all that confident that their guardians are particularly competent. Perhaps this feeling is simply stronger in the U.S. due to our generally poor education, as Goiter mentioned, which is why there is an inherent distrust of the police as authority figures (although, I guess, there's a general distrust of authority anyway), which in turn leads to the impression that they're put in place "from above" as a means of controlling the population.

[Dalty]

It's always good to feel superior to authority figures! It makes us feel.......... superior.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Jubbers sent me a message yesterday to let me know that DeKalb County, the county in Alabama where I grew up, was mentioned on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. She then sent me the clip. Here's the relevant bit (it goes from the time stamp to roughly 2:30):



(That's not the way we pronounce DeKalb, by the way. We pronounce the second syllable so that it sounds like "cab" says when said by most people from the U.S.)

Here's the exchange (with some minor edits for comprehensibility's sake) that followed after I watched the clip:

Goiter
DeKalb county speeding tickets are pricey.

Jubbers
No kidding.

Goiter
And if you don't watch it, they will tack bullshit charges on them. I got a speeding ticket for supposedly going five miles over the speed limit down the mountain side on the way from Crossville to the Interstate. I was, unluckily, the last in a train of cars. We were all going roughly the same speed.

It's a pretty steep decline, and you're riding your brakes the entire way down. There's no shoulder to pull over on. You have to wait until you get to the bottom of the mountain to find a place to pull over. Because I did this, I got an extra fifty dollar fine for "evading arrest" added on the ticket. Seriously, though, there was was nowhere to pull over. And we were on a decline with blind spots. If I had stopped in the middle of the road when he turned his lights on, we almost certainly would have been rear-ended and/or killed.

He did a lot of swaggery, Barney Fyfe-like talking down to me about how when he lets me know it's time to pull over, I better pull over. When I got to where I could pull over, I pulled over as far as I could. I was in the ditch up against an embankment. He harassed me about where I'd chosen to pull over from his bullhorn (or megaphone, or speaker, or whatever it's called) and told me it wasn't sufficient, because I wasn't "all the way over."

I sat there and took everything he said to me without talking back or questioning it, because I was on my way back to Tuscaloosa, and I was more than half-convinced that he was itching to arrest me for belligerence. I think he also marked "belligerence" (or something like it) on the ticket.

I wanted to contest the ticket, but I was living in Tuscaloosa at the time, couldn't miss classes (I had a teacher who had already docked my grade because my great grandmother's funeral kept me from completing an assignment; I was a pallbearer, and I had the funeral program to prove it, but it didn't matter to her), and the court date was scheduled on a day during which I had two tests.

It ended up being something like $180. This was back in the late nineties. That was my one and only traffic ticket. I've gotten some parking tickets in St. Louis, but I don't consider those traffic tickets. The cop was a real jerk. His jerkishness was in wild disproportion to my offense.

[end chat]

* * *

The cop was black. I never told my family that he was black. Because it had no bearing on anything, and because I knew it would only fuel my family's racism. (He was, specifically, a state trooper. There are no black cops in my hometown or anywhere all that near it.) When my grandparents went to court in my absence/on my behalf so they could give DeKalb county the money I had given them to give DeKalb County, they learned that the cop was black. Later that day they called me and they asked me, "Why didn't you say he was black?"

I used to get pulled over all the time when I lived in Crossville. My first car had a Florida tag/plate, because my father, who lived in Florida, had given me his car. The same fucking cop used to pull me over about once a week to ask me what I was doing in town, why I was driving around so late (i.e., after dark), and whether or not I knew I had a Florida tag. Sometimes he would follow me for a mile or two before throwing on his lights and pulling me over. Carter was his name. I think he lost his badge for some dumb shit, but it took about a decade. Our police chief and former mayor also lost his badge. In his case, it was for soliciting sex from women he pulled over. He'd been doing it for years, but I think one finally got him on tape.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Father of Child Found in Freezer Expresses Anger, Regret

[Dalty]

Because his food was left out in the warm?

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Churchgoer Tries to Hide Gun after Accidentally Shooting It Mid-Prayer