The Glade 4.0

The 14th Amendment.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The one that granted citizenship to former slaves?

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It's the one that establishes Equal Protection.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It also banned Confederate officers, soldiers and politicians from being elected as members of the Federal Government. But I digress...

Is there an argument being made somewhere that 14th Amendment rights are being violating? I am not sure where you are going with this Wwen.

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It also banned Confederate officers, soldiers and politicians from being elected as members of the Federal Government. But I digress...[quote]

Turns out that problem was self-solving anyhow.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

That's weird, when I *thought* I looked 14th up I got the amendment I was looking for. Now I don't know which one it was.

Anyway, it allows the federal gov to put down insurrections.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Constitutional amendments don't grant the federal government the power to put down insurrections. There may be a federal law that does so, however. If there is, it probably has a name like "the Insurrection Act."

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Constitutional Amendments aren't needed to give the Federal Government power to put down insurrections. This is an inherent power int he definition of a nation and a government; a government that lacks the power (whether legal or actual) to put down insurrections fails to meet the definition of a government. It is the same thing with the power to repel foreign invaders; it is a power inherent in the definition of government and of a nation. There are very few powers like this, but the simple rule is that any power which, if not exercised when necessary, would lead to the nation being replaced by another one (whether internally or externally) is a power which necessarily exists and which the Constitution may not prohibit and does not need to specify. Otherwise, it is not a Constitution at all.

Article I further authorizes the use of the militia to do so, in addition to the Armed Forces.



Some people, being cute, might try to argue that this means ONLY the militia could be used, but if that were the case it would also be the case that ONLY the militia could repel invasion, which then makes us wonder what the military authorized elsewhere in article 1 is actually for.

The Insurrection act, like most other acts, specifies HOW the government will suppress insurrection:



The Insurrection Act is passed pursuant to this clause, the one before, and the powers inherent in the definition of a nation.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Not trying to be cute with that militia crap, but is putting down an insurrection a military or policing action? Does it matter from any meaningful legal standard? Is there a scenario where Marines are shoulder-to-shoulder with FBI, CIA, ATF and Marshalls facing down armed citizens?

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That depends on the insurrection. Great Britain used its military, and failed. The Union, on the other hand, did not. Other insurrections, however, may not require that level of force.

We should not imagine that an insurrection is a simple matter of “Government, Law Enforcement, and Military Versus Citizens” even if it is very serious. Much of the military is part-time and are both citizens and in the military. Many military members and law enforcement people are themselves “armed citizens.” Depending on who is in charge and why there is an insurrection, anything that actually gets that serious cannot assume unity on either side of that equation.

Also, it is quite possible in the current situation, that law enforcement is mostly MIA either because of government action or because they have individually walked off the job. Or possibly other reasons. We may be talking about significant number of armed citizens being the ones putting down the insurrection with possibly significant deputization.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Sounds like a bad time, let's not do that.

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Indeed, let's not.

"Not", however, will mean accepting some very hard truths:

1) To the degree that there is a need for police reform, it is going to be expensive, and it is NOT going to result in nicey-nice policing where no one gets shot ever again. No amount of de-escalation training is going to make it possible to de-escalate out of every situation. Things that (in my view) do need to happen are ends to civil forfeiture, no-knock warrants, and to regarding the possession of a weapon in and of itself as something that warrants action. The anti-gun people will need to start accepting that regarding possession of a gun as a problem will result in escalation far more often than we would like. Simply more training overall is probably a good idea because there just isn't a lot of it. Jocko Willink proposed 20% of time should be spent on training; I do not know if that's do-able, but 10% might be and it would be a lot better.

2) There is a need for people reform as well. Quite a few people are going to need to accept that shoving a phone into a situation that's already half over to film it is not an investigation, or cause of action against a police officer. Neither is seeing such a video on YouTube without any idea who filmed it, what happened before or after, left, right, above, or below, what might have been done to the video, nor can we necessarily trust that it captured what's right there (especially in the dark, adverse weather, or when the camera is bouncing all over the place). Far too much outrage at "police brutality" is based on collecting anecdotes, and not always based on quality evidence. The George Floyd video is VERY clear-cut; few videos rise to this standard. Finally, a lot of black people and white leftists are going to have to accept that "racism" is at best a simplisitic explanation for very complex factors - and some of those factors involve political actors (not politicians necessarily) trying to maintain a fear of police and distrust of white people in general in order to hold onto black votes.

3) The government has a responsibility to maintain a monopoly on force. When it fails to do this, it is failing its citizens just as when it overuses force, or uses it for illegitimate purposes. When the government fails to maintain a monopoly on force, some people use it themselves with impunity. This is a failure of the government to protect the rights and freedoms of the citizenry just as when the government itself directly infringes those rights.

4) Some means of holding press, social media, and technology accountable and reasonably neutral and detached must be found. I am not sure what that way is, and a perfect solution is unlikely to present itself, but the problem right now with Freedom of the Press is the same as the problem of voting: Making it a right has deprived it of the status of a responsibility.

Right now, we are seeing a problem of some local and state governments and press who have essentially backed themselves into a corner. Both local governments and press have been eager to tolerate and lionize violent protests that they agree with, on the assumption that they were (as in the past) largely temporary, and that by pandering to these mobs they could gain the support of the participants after it was all over. In order to do this, however, they had to either NOT enforce the law, or for the press, dress up obvious violence as something else. Some of the press efforts have been laughable (CNN calling a burning building a "fiery protest") so I won't belabor that. The city and state governments tried to enforce the law just enough to appear to be doing something, but mostly letting rioters riot, while pretending the Federal government is somehow escalating this by... enforcing the law (along with silly allegations about "unmarked vehicles", as if Bill Barr invented unmarked law enforcement vehicles last month or something).

I won't go into the partisan political effects, but the immediate socio-political effects are potentially very dangerous. It is one thing when this happens in leftist hotbeds in the center city; it is another when people are marching through residential neighborhoods shining lights in windows. That turns into doors being knocked on, then kicked - then one of those 5 million new gun owners putting a .223 or 9mm or 12 gauge round through a "protestor". Then the local government tries to pretend the householder is at fault (we already saw this in Missouri, the ridiculous appearance of the couple notwithstanding) and then people really start to get afraid - "You won't protect us from the mob, but you'll protect the mob from us." It is also another thing when it moves to Kenosha - or shows up some place like Dallas. Then there will be demands for action against local government by the state, or states by the Federal government - and people in those states start to fear.

There's also the reality of fear among the police and the military. "You want me to go out there and enforce the law, but you'll throw me under the bus if I actually do it - and if they show up at MY home with MY family, I'll be fed to the narrative as well."

Fundamentally, we have people in government or the press that have not yet realized this mob eventually comes for them too, and are more afraid of being tarred with the brush they are themselves trying to tar the right with. The question is where the curve of these people figuring it out (or being replaced by those who have) intersects with the curve of violence. If they wait too long, it will not be possible to arrest it without fairly serious consequences. Imagine the consequences if a major city police department DOES have mass resignations. What happens if just 20% of officers in Portland resign?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Honest question so please don't be snarky, how serious / widespread are these "mobs" and "riots"? If you recall I live in a suburb 20 minutes outside of Cleveland and other than a single night where a single street of boutique shops were vandalized and a police car was burned... there has been nothing. I see that Portland in the meantime has been having nightly crowds that occasionally turn violent for the last three months. When I look down the list I think Chicago had a night of riots, Atlanta had I believe three nights of riots, LA had one, maybe two and just about every other city in the country has been quiet.

My parents and sister who rely on Fox News on the other hand are constantly texting me warnings of socialist mobs coming to destroy America, so-called-protesters (their term, heavy on air-quotes) marching into the suburbs with torches and molotov cocktails, planes full of rioters flying around the country and other various other panic-inducing warnings. But I haven't seen it anywhere locally or nationally other than Trump making eerily similar claims.

So to come back to the original question, how widespread are these?

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In time, this too shall pass.

Thank you sir but I am color blind, that site does literally nothing for me. Reading through the Wikipedia list they cited seems to have some big gaps in it too.



This citation for example seems to lack several of the locations that I know experienced unrest.

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This is a good question, but one far more complex than it initially might appear. I will try, once again, to be brief and probably fail.

First, relying on FOX news to report that there are, in fact, riots that other news outlets would prefer you not know about - or at least not recognize as riots - is not a bad thing. FOX's main purpose is to report things other outlets won't. Relying on FOX for analysis of the riots is not a good idea; while other outlets want to excuse or explain away riots, FOX would have you believe that the rioters will claim control of the government in the next 15 minutes or so. Both views are nonsense.

So, how widespread are they? As in, right now? Not as widespread as earlier this summer. There were riots involving heavy looting in quite a few cities. Most of those burned themselves out, however, once things to loot ran out and once everyone had their fill of attacking statues and other vandalism.

They do, however, flare up from time to time in various places like Kenosha, and over increasingly questionable "outrages" by the police. The guy in Kenosha (Blake?) was not a George Floyd or Breanna Taylor situation (both two of the worst instances of police misconduct we've ever seen).

Then there's Portland and Seattle. Both are ongoing hotbeds of unrest, but protesting and general misbehavior are sort of public sports in those cities. What is more alarming is the emboldening of them by the grandees in power there right now - the efforts to have a go at defunding and eliminating the police, and the toleration of CHAZ/CHOP. Protests there, and in several other places have spread to suburbs and residential areas and now include harassing people in their homes, and BLM and ANTIFA activities both there and in small incidents elsewhere have grown bolder and bolder, such as coming into outdoor restaurant areas to harass patrons.

So the answer right now is "not really very widespread"; there are primarily two cities where its just ongoing, and then there's flare-ups elsewhere. However, the more complex question is "where is it going, and how fast?" Growth can include levels of violence, or areas affected.

What's not well-understood is that growth in either can be very abrupt; it is not necessarily a slow, steady linear growth where we can see it coming and authorities can decide to finally get their act together and control it before its too late. It can easily grow very quickly - people can start hopping on board, either out of fear or the belief it's the way things are going, or just radicalization or nothing better to do. It can also spill over into very significant violence very quickly. The first shootings have already happened. The next ones will be easier.

There's the old saying about the lily pads on the lake - if they double every day, the day before the lake is covered, only half of it is covered. How widespread the protests are right now is not nearly as interesting or meaningful as what is likely to happen in the near future.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

That is a fair point. So I guess I am looking at how widespread riots are as if it is a magic window into how close the nation is to a flash point. But that assumes that these rioters are representative of some larger monolithic movement, an assumption that quickly breaks down when you actually look at the people who are being arrested for rioting. Those being charged run the gamut of everyone from social activists who would likely qualify as true-believers to spoiler socialites who's motivations are at best social posturing to right-wing agitators who show up to counter-protest wearing body armor because they are spoiling for a fight.

So I guess as you are saying about lily pads suddenly covering a pond, in order for that to apply in this scenario wouldn't there need to be an underlying unifying leadership for these movements? Otherwise you could have the entire country erupt into riots that burn out quickly due to a lack of cohesive goals and unifying theme. Which is what it feels like is what happened with Occupy Wallstreet years ago, the movement meant so many different things to so many different groups who each had separate sets of demands that ultimately a very popular sentiment just fizzled out.

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I think we should disregard the right-wing types as they're clearly just responding to the lefties. More than one agitation movement can exist at the same time.

While I think a monolithic, unified leftist movement would be the most obvious way that the leftist movement expands and exerts itself, it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. Even within movements that are fairly unified there is generally more than one school of thought about how things precisely ought to go. There's also the concept of "useful idiots", namely the socialites. They can easily contribute to the growth of a movement just by creating the appearance there's far more backing to all this than there really is.



This is not an unlikely result. I certainly would not rule it out. However, it seems to have already displayed a remarkable amount of persistence, and has been greatly emboldened by the light handling city governments have given it, the encouragement from those governments and the press (including those who are clearly doing so merely to avoid agreeing with Trump on anything at all) and gets rejuvenated every time there's someone shot by police which it turns out is not that rare an event in a country with 330+ million people in it and a hell of a lot of violent criminals. There is also the surplus of idle people generated by COVID and the desire just to get out of the house and do something - again, encouraged by idiots who think that protesting is totally ok if it's against racism but the doom of us all if its against lockdowns.

I think it is past the point of easily fizzling out. That said, I agree that at this time there is not really unified leadership that could take organized steps to get it to expand really fast. There is more organization than there might appear; rioters are showing up better and better equipped and products like leaflets are getting produced in some way and distributed, just for example. It's not literally a completely undirected mob. But, there does not appear to be anything trulyorganizing or directing it.

That could change, though. You are correct that it contains a lot of different groups with some heavily incompatible views. But it's not at all impossible that some leadership could emerge that could create consensus enough to really start this moving forward. I do not know if this is strictly necessary, or if it will happen, or has already happened and we aren't aware of it. Perhaps, perhaps not. We don't know if the lily pads are expanding or contracting, or how quickly they are. The point fo the analogy was to demonstrate that things can expand out of control very quickly if you assume they are going at a linear rate when they are not.

I do not think there is cause for deep alarm yet, but there is definitely cause for vigilance and for avoiding complacency.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I also think it's important to understand it's not "the country". There's somewhere between 6 and 15 urban/metropolitan areas that are at risk, and the rest of the country is just cocking an eyebrow and going "y'all's crazy". Now, to be fair, those urban/metropolitan areas comprise a non-trivial percentage of the population, thus amplifying their newsworthiness (or the perception, at least), and that has a certain cascading effect.

I think what's cause for somewhat more alarm is how it reared up in Kenosha, and now in Lancaster, PA, neither exactly urban/metropolitan areas. Granted, Lancaster is close to Philadelphia and the associated high-density East Coast corridor, but Amish Country would not have been a place I would have selected.

My worry is that the cascading effect you mention is, presently, unknown. I would liken it to a coefficient we do not know the value of, but if it is above a certain point it will result in self-sustaining expansion.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Kenosha is, depending on how you want to look at it, a suburb of either Chicago or Milwaukee, or perhaps both. Lancaster is, I agree, an outlier. Although, "cops shoot man charging them with a brandished knife" would not have been particularly newsworthy prior to around now.

The rest of your post was fun to read, but I don't really feel a burning drive to comment on it.

You raise a compelling point about the need for realistic expectations of police reform. You're never going to get to zero police shootings, without a degree of "people reform" that, quite frankly, we're all uncomfortable with. The use of force, or the threat of force, is an important negotiating tool. Though I'm philosophically opposed to the death penalty, for instance, it has a valid purpose. There needs to be an answer to, "What are you gonna do about it?" Maximum application of force is not a suitable answer to all problems, however, as it removes the incentive for the other party to de-escalate. When there are a range of possible punishments available, fewer criminals murder their victims. Some criminals still do murder their victims, though, and the police do need to be ready and willing to go all the way there if that's what's about to go down.

The issue that a lot of police interactions run into is that some percentage of black Americans have the notion that the police are racists who are out to kill them. We can debate whether cops are racist and to what degree until we're blue in the face, and that doesn't matter. What matters is a statistically significant portion of blacks believes this. That's the obstacle to overcome. Law and order types who do not accept this fundamental fact will never make any headway. All the police reform in the world is meaningless if the community doesn't acknowledge that reform is happening.

Training, which you touched on, is another big issue. In addition to training is officer evaluation. There are some people who are simply unfit to be police officers. How many officers like this exist is something of an open question. It is undoubtedly fewer than the general public thinks, as police interactions are generally negative to begin with. Previously, my sense was that most officers denied the existence of glorified bullies using the badge as a shield to hide behind while they brutalized their fellow man. The most significant thing I've seen recently has been the number of police officers who, when faced with this abuse of the badge and uniform, have expressed genuine outrage. This is promising, but until police departments start tossing these guys out on their asses, convincing the public they're reforming isn't going to be possible.

One of the changes that will have to occur is that police unions will have to be overhauled, and possibly abolished. However, it isn't fair to the police to treat them as if they are uniquely bad in this way. Teachers have the same problem. It is a harrowing experience for a school principal to try to fire a teacher that gets caught diddling children. The extent to which the union bureaucracy defends bad actors boggles the mind. This is going to be a hard pill for the left to swallow, because they love unions about as much as the right loves churches.

You bring up a valid point about the need to stop regarding possessing a gun as a crime in and of itself (and the escalation that attitude invariably leads to), but that is an argument that cuts both ways. We need police to cease this fantasy that they are in life-threatening danger every moment they're on the job (Portland and Seattle notwithstanding - those police officers should have traded their rubber bullets for live ammunition back in June). There are aspects of policing that are dangerous, but we had, until recently, a declining trend in violent crime. This notion that they're in danger all of the time is causing a lot of these tragic deaths that we're bombarded with in the news. In this, I do not think we are actually raising different arguments. Your point about viewing possession of a gun as a crime unto itself causing escalation implies that you think we have primed many of our officers to go weapons-hot too quickly. There is likely another complicating factor as well, which is officers running into the same type of knucklehead over and over again - almost like everyone they encounter is the same person, just with a different name and face. This has to cause frustration and demoralization, which could be impacting the officers' decision-making. It may be that police should be required to rotate duties every so often, and take a one-year break from certain job functions.

We also need to be more fair to police officers in what we expect of them. I think one of the problems is that we have too many laws and crimes for the number of police we actually have. More police isn't the answer. I think we need fewer laws and crimes. Police should not "have options" as far as charging people with crimes. That leads to asymmetric enforcement of law, which causes all kinds of societal problems. As much as it sucks to get a speeding ticket, and as awesome as it is to get off with a warning, if everybody gets that ticket, it's fair. Every jurisdiction, from federal on down to municipal, has laws on the books specifically to allow police to charge people with something in lieu of evidence of the crime they want to prosecute. Basically, to enable the police to send Al Capone to prison on tax evasion since they couldn't catch him on any of the actual gangster **** he was doing. (And on that note, ending Prohibition would have also ended Capone's empire.) The big offender here is obvious, but I think there are more opportunities to improve our body of law than just the drug war.

On people reform, there's something to be said for bringing back a certain level of violence. I watched a clip from one of the Atlanta riots where a white teenager hit the windshield of a police car with his skateboard. Out pops this brick wall of a black man to provide that boy the loving discipline his parents were too pussified to give him. Seeing some of these videos, and hearing the vile **** coming out of these rioters' mouths, usually white rioters spouting off racial slurs at black police officers, I'm really coming around to the argument that we have a generation of adults who don't know what an ass-whoopin' is.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

BLM/Antifa orgs also operate in the same way terror cells do. De-centralized. No leader than can be targeted. They riots aren't wide spread (yet, we'll see what happens if Trump wins) It's alarming that Ds are courting these people the same way Trump courted the Alt-Right for votes.

Confusion often happens because people don't understand how power or progress works. If you are a prog and get everything or most everything you want, several decades later you're the con when the new progs pop up. That's why people like Bret Weinstein, who still call themselves progs, are confused and wrong to not understand it's changed. Old cons are still alive, but politically irrelevant except that they haven't all passed on to heaven/hell.

I technically have progress I'd like to make too, but no one supports my wing of radical.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I think another big component that needs to be addressed is quotas and revenue generation. Fines from policing activity should not be allowed to enter the general fund for cities/towns/villages/etc nor should be they used to fund the departments themselves.

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I did not realize Kenosha was that close to those cities; that makes the sudden appearance of so many protestors more understandable.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."