Originally published at: Sovereign Citizen tries to outsmart cop, gets tased in the nuggets | Boing Boing
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Oh god the bro asshole faux-lawyer speak!
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On one side, it’s fun see some white asshole having some for a change
On the other, it’s sad to know that, if this guy was black, he would be shot on the the first minute on this footage
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Liked for “in the nuggets”
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These people remind me a lot of flat earthers. For flat earthers, their understanding of science is so lacking, that to them, science just sounds like magic nonsense words, and they think if they just spout off a bunch of sciency sounding words, that makes them as knowledgable as actual scientists. With sovereign citizens, their understanding of US law and history is so lacking, that to them, the law sounds like magic nonsense words, and they think if they just spout off the right ones in the right order, it will cast a legal spell rendering them immune to the power of the state.
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As much as I appreciate an ass like this getting his comeuppance, I vehemently disagree with the casual deployment of a taser in situations like this. Without the taser, this likely would have been a couple of feeble attempts to push past the cops, more faux legalese, and him strutting off in a huff still recording.
Sending 50,000 volts through your nervous system is not necessarily harmless. And smacking your head on the floor when you lose motor control most certainly is not.
Tasers should be used when lethal force would be justified, not because some loudmouth is annoying you.
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It’s Admirality Court LeviOHsah, not levioSAH
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Absolutely. This guy might be a clown, but this is still Abuse-By-Cop. OBEY or be tased is never funny.
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fun to laugh at the sovereign citizens, but this is 10 years old. Be far more interesting to see what’s up with him after covid, qanon and MAGA have been around.
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Mostly, it used to be an anti-tax thing.
Wesley Snipes tried it for all the good it did him.
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Maybe he has a channel somewhere?
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There’s also a subset (maybe not the right word since it’s a movement with a completely unconnected history) of sovereign citizens called Moorish Sovereign Citizens who are mostly (maybe all) African-American. In some ways, they come across as even stranger that the white racist sovereign citizens, but I have to admit that they might have a slighter more sensical argument, since they argue that they aren’t subject to the laws of the US since they were brought here against their will as slaves (or are descended from such). Once in court, though, they sound just like any other sovereign citizen.
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Exactly. In their marketing materials the company that sells them says “Our mission is to Protect Life,” and “in the next 50 years, we’ll make the bullet obsolete.” But it’s quite clear from tons of data that the vast majority of instances where they’re actually being used by cops are not situations where the cop would otherwise be compelled to use a gun. If this cop felt his life was in immediate danger from this dumb “sovereign citizen” and that he couldn’t have handled the guy without resorting to the taser he obviously shouldn’t be a cop.
Edit: apparently the company was planning to build taser-equipped drones, and only shelved the idea after most of their ethics board resigned in protest. Wonder how they were going to try to justify that one as a legitimate self-defense tool?
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There are problems with tasers even where the cops don’t usually have guns.
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Fuck around and find out from a professional fucker.
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Sovereign Citizen
See you deal here with admiralty maritime jurisdiction, which deals with persons, which I am not… Excuse me, excuse me. You’re blocking my freedom of movement… you’re violating my rights.
Cop
Oh well, you see, only persons have rights, so you’re shit out of luck there, buddy.
Creationists, too. (I’m guessing the overlap between the various groups is pretty high.) I see a lot of creationist videos where they think they can “disprove” all of modern biology by playing games with the definitions of a couple words commonly used in science education. As if that made any sense when the definitions of those words changes nothing, much less eliminated all the… actual evidence? But it does make sense if one grows up in a “fundamentalist” religious household, though - one’s whole experience about the fundamentals of reality, of being told what’s acceptable behavior, is based on someone playing word games with a “holy text.” Of course the same logic would apply to less important things as well.
Yeah, the baseline response for US cops is "shoot them, " so everything else is a de-escalation in their eyes. In a more reasonable country, the cops, if they were intent on arresting him, would have wrestled some cuffs onto him. US cops don’t want the hassle of that, though.
Though in the US, those wouldn’t even be considered “problems.” It’s just… normal - or even better than the usual, i.e. shooting anyone holding “a weapon” or “being combative.” US cops taser people with no provocation at all - the person they’re interacting with is slow to comply, because they don’t like how they’re being spoken to, etc.
Yeah, they seem to fall into the same sort of nonsense-legal-logic as sov cits in general, ultimately. (I’m guessing they all the groups steal the others’ ideas and legal strategies that they see online, so we’ll probably see even more overlap in the future.) And they’re into some unpleasant stuff that seems specific to their group, e.g. trying to steal people’s houses by breaking in and changing the locks. Which might be funny if they targeted rich people, but they go for softer targets they know can’t fight back - Black working class homeowners, often single women, for whom they create enormous problems as the legal system won’t help them.
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I’ve seen that a dozen times and it never gets old.
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