Thread by @gravislizard

this sort of situation always makes me think about an anecdote i heard about abortion protestors in like 201

https://twitter.com/andrwwang/status/1116796580680613889

*2012
I don't have a source but I just remember someone saying they were at an anti abortion rally and asked one of the women protesting "what punishment should there be for abortion then?" and she just got real quiet and said "well i don't think anyone should go to jail..."

obviously that was never a universal POV (there were people clamoring for the death penalty for abortion decades before I was born) but I think about it a lot because i think people don't really think about rules much

i take the word of the victim in the quoted video at face value. i don't doubt for a second that they racially profiled this guy. but what's weird to me to think about is the stakes.

followup tweets say after 11 PM you have to show your ID to get in. alright, so how do we enforce that? oh. it's cops. it has to be cops, private or public, and what can cops do if someone 'disobeys'? They only have so many options.

"show your ID" "or what?"
the answer is always, without fail, "or I'll hit you" and that's really fucking weird. It's a library. What are the stakes here?

It's like home invasion scenarios that white people fantasize about where they kill an invader who's running away *so they can't have their stuff.* Nobody would say in cold blood that any amount of property is worth a human life. And yet.

Tacitly, it is. Tacitly, they create situations, without *saying* as much, where it is. In other words, the punishment for being in the library without permission is death, if you resist hard enough.

The cops are always within their right as long as you don't do what they say. Meaning that all rules, all laws, no matter how trivial, become death penalties - because the real situation is that death is the sentence for *disobeying a cop*

And "cop" gets more and more and more broadly defined, and at this point I'm not even sure if the bulk of cops are actually cops or pinkertons.

(that's a fun fact i learned today - Securitas acquired Pinkerton, and I see Securitas fucking everywhere, so I'm just gonna call em pinkertons)

this is how everything ended up structured. there's only one crime, and it's "disobeying" and the distance between an innocuous, trivial act to "disobeying" gets smaller every year, it feels like.

maybe fuckin sometimes you just can't make a person leave. maybe you have to deal with that because you have a semi-public space and sometimes a person might walk in there. if you have a problem with that you can lock the doors. Assault isn't an acceptable solution.

it's possible that some rules can't be enforced, that things that work pretty much all work on the honor system, and if someone wants to ignore the rules you're going to have to use violence to stop them, so maybe you just can't enforce that rule.

rules and laws are, I think, entirely the product of inequality, and the majority of them aren't needed if there's no motive to do things that hurt someone.

and that's why this looks so absurd and horrifying on its face - because the entire concept of keeping people out of places *starts* with the suspicion that someone would have a bad reason to go *in* to a place

if you read through one of the articles on this it becomes extremely clear that the entire reason this rule exists, the entire reason a man was attacked, the entire reason a man (and surely many others) has been harassed multiple times is because we won't house the homeless.

a drop-in-the-bucket budgetary allocation could remove the "need" for reams of rules, laws, cops and literally tens of thousands of pinkertons all over the country. The things we're sacrificing to avoid housing the homeless are ludicrous.

we cover the nation in hideous fences, harass and arrest people for *existing* in any public space, spend a fortune on cops and mercenaries, put locked doors and gates and spikes in places that should be open to everyone, all to maintain a cycle of pointless torment. knowingly.

and of course to a larger extent we would have no reason to restrict access to public places at all if there wasn't the burning, seething hatred of people who aren't paying for something. there's no excuse to be somewhere unless money is leaving you.