You openly describe yourself as a “revolutionary”
Yep.
and you think probable cause doesn’t exist?
Correct.
For all the cops know, you’ve taken it upon yourself to finish Bill Ayres’ work.
Last I checked the Vietnam War was already ended a few years back.
Anyway.
I did not openly describe myself
as anything to Cowboy Hat. He didn’t ask about my political beliefs and I had no reason to mention them. As far as I know Texas Highway Patrol hasn’t got a Psi Corps.
Even if he had somehow telepathically detected views we never discussed, I do not believe that a person’s political beliefs are even remotely anything like probable cause
for random, open-ended fishing-expedition of their person, papers or effects on the basis of pure speculation that maybe they’re guilty of somethin’ or another, even if it’s completely unrelated to those beliefs. In any minimally free society a person’s political beliefs by themselves aren’t a sufficient basis for arrests or warrantless forced searches of their papers or effects about purely speculative crimes. That seems to me to be the very definition of psychotic police-statism. How about you?
I should point out, again, that neither my whiskers nor my politics change the fact that the drug-dog sniff-search, used in this case to justify a forced warrantless search of my car and all my effects — as it is used in many other cases, involving people without whiskers or anarchist convictions — was demonstrably either (a) completely fraudulent, or else (b) completely unreliable. The fact that police routinely use methods that are easily faked and wildly unreliable in order to justify significant, invasive uses of legal force against completely innocent people seems like it might be a matter for some concern, even for those who don’t agree with or much like my political convictions.
(That post is about police violence against sex workers. I am not a sex worker, but the point does to some extent generalize.)
]]>I wasn’t. I was in the left lane because I was passing an 18-wheel truck at the time Cowboy Hat pulled onto the road behind me. That’s why I mentioned that I had to wait for the opportunity
to shift over into the right lane. Cowboy Hat stayed in the left lane far longer than I did (and while riding in the left lane slowed down so as not to pass me on the left) and he had nothing to say about the left lane when he pulled me over or when he issued the paper warning.
I didn’t go into detail on this point in the original post because I don’t think it’s very important to the story.
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