Man Opposing Data Center Arrested for Speaking Slightly Too Long
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Comments112https://www.404media.co/man-opposing-data-center-arrested-for-speaking-slightly-too-long/Open linkView original on feddit.org
Police officers always seem to align with the interests of the capitalist (Epstein) class. What is it about that job that attracts so many people with contempt for the working class?
I’m stealing the phrase ‘Epstein class’, that’s a great way of explaining how horrific the rich and powerful are
I didn’t coin the term.
Epstein class perfectly describes how they see themselves above laws and human decency. The world should never allow people to amass that much wealth.
What's the alternative though? Let everyone be above the law? Because, that just sounds like a recipe for more trouble.
lol what’s the alternative? Tax the shit out of them. That amount of wealth is a danger to every democracy and the planet.
i’m not 100% sure, but i think they meant alternative to the cops, not the wealthy
@[email protected] which, i mean. police the police or something. not to mention the system needs so many reforms in general
That's not remotely what they were saying. Wtf
It was a joke.
It's ironic how your first thought is not to make them accountable in front of the law just like everyone else.
This dude just unironically accidentally solved capitalism.
I think the term is capitalist propaganda that's trying to separate the bad rich from the "good" rich. "Yeah I made hundreds of millions insider trading and don't pay any taxes but hey, I never hung out with those bad rich guys."
I don't know, I think any linguistic coinage that gets Americans in general to finally get that the rich hate and want to destroy them, the better.
I've been using "predator class."
I've used "parasite class," but I think yours is more fitting
I would say he was prophetic. But a lot of us realized what he did during COVID. Had a minute to think and pay attention.
Good ol Socko.
Predators protect predators.
The answer is quite mundane. I've a few friends in a (non-US) police force. The answer is that the rich/powerful are annoying as hell to go against.
They either know the law, or pay someone to know it for them. They can make obviously illegal things legal on paper. They can also nitpick everything. E.g. spending £5K on lawyers to get out of a £100 fine, since they don't want to get the points. Any procedural mistakes, or paperwork errors can kill a case, or at least drag it out for years.
They also have contacts that can apply pressure. When their wife knows your boss's, boss's boss's wife, they can make your life and career VERY uncomfortable.
End result, most officers learn to pick their battles with the rich and powerful. They will make your life hard, and will get away without everything being perfect.
In practice this can easily turn into taking the easy road. Even when the rich aren't even technically in the right.
Plausible deniability is the name of the game, or as my lawyer relative would put it - "without the letter of the law (and hard evidence) on your side, don't bother pursuing based on the spirit, no matter how blatant."
Stupidity.
Cops are almost entirely made up of people who were too stupid to get a white collar job.
As a blue collar guy, I think they’re too stupid to be blue collar workers.
Edit- I had to do a 5-year apprenticeship, pass a state certification test and do continual education to maintain the certification.
How long is the average American police academy and how challenging is it?
Yikes, I really can’t get on board with “blue collar workers are morons”-style thinking.
The rich give the violent dullards and chest-thumpers the imprint of honorability.
The average cop imagines himself a Knight Protector of the Realm when he is, odds on, Barney Fife with a spouse who flinches.
All of the answers before this are wrong. It's their vein attempt to show us that they're better than us. And that's it. They're so uncomfortable with themselves they they have to take you out on you. They believe they are part of the club.
Is it Vein or is it an arterior motive?
That would explain the massive overlap in domestic violence.
Another good one I read:
"How can I be racist? My wife's eye is black."
Oh god damn
Acab, obviously.
But do you seriously not understand why cops follow orders from politicians and not citizens?
We just ignored the part where we cared about who our politicians were.
The job description is literally to protect the powers that be and in exchange get your own authority to power-trip on too. It is fundamentally a reactionary job that should not exist, and neither should the system they protect.
They’re uneducated but handed a living wage job and they are usually white men with narcissistic and psychopathic traits. The culture of entitlement and superiority within these ranks rewards the most narcissistic and psychopathic among them in the power dynamic within the fostered culture. This system then reinforces the racialized hierarchy within the self serving capitalist power structure and solidifies the tiers of oppression.
a paycheck :/
The Epstein class is not just capitalist. Stop sewing bullshit.
It’s capitalists and people in power which generally serve the capitalist class.
It's also sowing
I’m gonna say “arrest is unwarranted. Just kick ‘em out or end their speaking time.”
Nah, there are options between “nothing” and “arrest”. Even for Nazis.
I wouldn’t be sad about some Nazi-punching though.
Kick them out?
...but you'll happily spend multiple posts arguing about it, even though a link to it was right there in the post.
YouTube doesn't work for you? Second link down.
I’m waiting for videos of cops fighting against Nazis instead of protecting them.
That YouTube video is wild. Approximately 20 seconds from being first notified that his time was up, officers had already come up to him. 20 seconds. He handed them his documents. He was done. There was no logical reason for the arrest.
The arrest was done to warn the other peasants
Sure there was, they wanted to show their power.
Link?
It's in the original post.
ACAB
while I don't disagree with your statement, I'm certain that it was not the cops who made this call.
So they were just... following orders?
They are not exempt from guilt, but the that is not the point. The point is that this is not just yet another example of random police brutality and abuse of their powers. This is oligarch dictated suppression of dissidents.
It is different and much more serious than just "cops being abusive assholes".
yes, and they are to blame. but so are those who gave the orders.
So ACAB+
No, it is, they decide whether to make the arrest or not. They decided to violate the first amendment, and embraced a bad faith request by a cynical and corrupt local lawmaker bought out by the tech industry.
That is no cop out that they were "ordered" from a city council member, they take an oath to protect and defend the constitution, and other laws, and don't get to cop out to following orders in violating the freedom of speech, and other laws and decency in such a transparent abuse of power in service of tech.
I never indicated that that cops did anything right here, did i?
You dismissed their agency in the matter, thus giving them a pass.
I agreed with the acab, but also asked for credit for those who ordered it
You didn't ask for anything though, you made a statement. If your intent was to ask for something, then you should restate it as a question.
I see, you need everything spelled out.
It doesn't matter, they did the will of whoever made the call. That's why we say ACAB, because cops either enforce the will of the ruling class (thus making them bastards) or they lose their jobs and stop being cops.
ACAB has always been a message of class struggle and how all of us have to stand tall and refuse to betray our class interests. Cops betray working class interests for a paycheck and a feeling of superiority.
If you read my comment, I did agree with the blame being put on the cops. I just wanted to also highlight the politicians who made the call.
You mean like someone hacked their brain stems and was controlling them remotely? Yeah, that is a problem...
while the cops are blame (I agreed with the ACAB statement) I also deserve the higher ups are to be blamed.
Who gives a shit? You don't give a Nazi a pass because they were "just following orders", do you?
Who gave a pass?
You did, by dismissing their agency in the matter. Again, who gives a fuck if they weren't the ones who made the call? They enforced the draconian measures, they are just as to blame.
I specifically agreed to them being bastards, obviously in this context. they are just as to blame. sure thing... I even confirmed that.
That must be that "freedom" that Vance and Rubio say Europe lacks.
This is exactly why there are non-profit bail funds to donate to in many communities. These funds frequently help cover these people that are the vanguard of democracy.
This data center they're hysterically agitating to build is going to take part of someone's yard, someone's entire house and property, and it will be right by a neighborhood making it's stupid noise. And a lot of people outside of the town will have to deal with $400 per month electric bills, and they just can't afford it.
Maybe this is the (unfortunate) push that drives renewables.
These are the same material limitations that has driven renewables for decades, the US has an ideological dedication to absorbing the consequences of sustaining fossil fuel use anyway. The US is a for-profit imperial power with an owning class who sees anyone and everyone beneath them as exploitable and disposable. People in the US have tolerated the fossil fuel industry making their lives worse consistently for decades. Those same people will always adjust to worse conditions if they have to, and that owning class knows it.
There is no breaking point, people have to choose to accept the consequences of resisting with the knowledge that these people will never stop unless forced to.
Lol no these companies are now building their own fossil fuel plants. Mortgage the future is always the plan. I've been in the power industry for 15 years and only since AI have I been asked to work on fossil fuel construction projects rather than decommission projects
One of our local public transit advocates did nothing more than present at city council meetings. They ordered the security team to follow him everywhere in the building, to the bathroom, and his car.
Even basic challenges to the people in your government is all too often met with straight up oppression tactics. He got them to stop by going to the press with it. Nothing else worked except more public pressure.
They arrest the opposition for nothing to keep others from speaking out.
Meanwhile, we have two members of Mark Zuckerberg's legal team sitting in court wearing facial recognition capable glasses.
It’s easier to target the jury that way
Excuseme, wath teh ufck ?
Land of the free.
Whoever told you that is your enemy
These times are going to make The Onion irrelevant.
The party of “small government” . I’m sure he’s on the maga cancel culture concentration camp list now..brought to you by palantir because f you
“Shut up, Poors.”
Talk too long in a public forum? Believe it or not, straight to jail.
Years ago there was a sketch in France making parody of local news to denounce racism: Anchor: "A man shot at a group of Arabs arguing they were too loud. After investigations, the police concluded that indeed, the Arabs were too loud".
This news brought that immediately in my mind.
You're only allowed to protest low-income housing in your local town you fucking idiot! God know's that's how democracy works dumby~
Used his free speech a little bit too long
He exceeded his quota of free tokens
Ahh so that's what they mean by "free speech". It's like a drink token at a wedding.
So you get one free speech, but if you want more speech you've gotta buy it, and probably have to pay a gratuity on top.
At a premium rate, I'm sure...getting a speech at a wedding is gonna be a bit more expensive than getting a speech at the dive bar. And it's not like you can just go and give a speech at another wedding. Then you'd just be crazy. Bursting into some random wedding and giving a speech. Without even a token.
I meant tokens as the units of text you pay for when you purchase a subscription to ChatGPT or one of the other AI models. Most AI companies offer you limited access for free to their most powerful models but you have to pay if you "speak too long" with the AI and exceed your quota of tokens.
All those new data centers (like the one the arrested man was opposing) are meant to power these AI. companies. Not a great joke, but that's what I was alluding to.
The only way to buy it is by appeasing the Epstein class
If we can't exercise our first amendment, maybe it's time to exercise our 2nd?
Yeah, authoritarian red state shithole. I don't even travel to/through such places when I can avoid it.
Gonna become fly-around states. Don't even want to breathe their high-altitude air. Just smells like manure and mercury.
Lol, fly-around states
New dimension to "flyover states" unlocked
How long until someone shoots up a construction site for a data center?
Don't even have to go that far. There are cheap and easily available perfectly safe substances that can be dumped on freshly poured concrete, or in empty forms, that keeps concrete from setting up correctly.
Sugar is very effective at destroying concrete
So effective. Soda works too.
I mean, the data centers themselves are flammable. And you would do more damage if you waited til they were built...
Yah bruh don't be rousing the rabble! You rabble rouser you!
Hail Capitalism, hail the Job Creators. /s
Were all those people cheering that the man was arrested?!
Not advocating violence, but shit like this is going to lead to violence.
lets you know who paid the council