I'm probably replying to this a bit late for anyone to actually read it, but here goes anyway.
It's good that you've provided a cite. Given the nature of the discussion, I think it's a little unreasonable for you to complain that people didn't look it up for you. If you're telling people that they're wrong and you're right in a situation where confusion and ambiguity is reasonable (for example if a state is apparently publishing multiple, contradictory bits of information on the same subject), it's a little unfair to tell people "you're wrong, and go look up the reason for yourself."
Anyway, on to the law itself. It still looks to me that the law doesn't quite say exactly what you said it does, and the law you've cited doesn't seem to cover all of your assertions. You wrote:
In the state of California it is illegal to drive in the passing lane when someone else is going faster than you. It is NOT illegal to pass on the right; it IS illegal to be passed on the right. You are also legally obligated to PULL OVER AND LET CARS BEHIND YOU PASS when there are five or more of them behind you. All of this is COMPLETELY REGARDLESS OF SPEED LIMIT.
I'll start with the assertion that your cite doesn't cover at all. That is that "you are also legally obligated to PULL OVER AND LET CARS BEHIND YOU PASS when there are five or more of them behind you". The law you cited doesn't seem to say anything about pulling over to let people by, or name any particular number of cars. The law that mentions this is:
21656. On a two-lane highway where passing is unsafe because of traffic in the opposite direction or other conditions, a slow-moving vehicle, including a passenger vehicle, behind which five or more vehicles are formed in line, shall turn off the roadway at the nearest place designated as a turnout by signs erected by the authority having jurisdiction over the highway, or wherever sufficient area for a safe turnout exists, in order to permit the vehicles following it to proceed. As used in this section a slow-moving vehicle is one which is proceeding at a rate of speed less than the normal flow of traffic at the particular time and place.
Which only covers two lane highways, and only when passing is actually unsafe. Also, only when there's either a marked area for the turnoff or it's "safe" to do so, which can cover a lot of ground. Also, this section does not mention that it's "notwithstanding the prima facie speed limits" and goes on to define slow moving in terms of "normal flow of traffic at the particular time and place." So, perhaps then "all of this is [not] COMPLETELY REGARDLESS OF SPEED LIMIT." Whether "normal" speed of traffic can be above the speed limits or not is a bit ambiguous. Seems to me that you could argue quite well that the fact that the "notwithstanding" is in the other section but not in this one, that it's intended that the speed limits be factored in. In any case, clearly "normal" isn't defined simply as how fast the cars behind want to go.
You seem to be correct that it's not illegal to pass on the right. I can't find any law against it per se. Of course, I can't find any actual exception to the speed limits, even when passing. So, even if the "normal" speed of traffic is 80, and you're passing someone who is going 65 in the left lane and you're at the "normal" speed of traffic, you're both breaking the law.
Finally, I'll address your principle assertion. The main position you've taken that people seem to be disagreeing with. That is that "In the state of California it is illegal to drive in the passing lane when someone else is going faster than you." The law you cited seems to actually completely disagree with that. It talks about "normal" speed of traffic, allowing it to be faster than the speed limit. If we assume "normal" speed to be the mean average speed of "traffic moving in the same direction at such time", then if there are exactly two cars on the road
Sure, but, in states without "fighting words" statutes, hitting them for it is usually a crime. There's almost always another way. Such as, if someone is blocking you from going to the bathroom:
If it's an actual public place, call a police officer and explain that they're disturbing the peace.
If it's a business owned "public place", tell the manager and have them thrown out, or at least made to step aside. If the manager won't, then you can leave and not patronize their business anymore, or contact whoever is above them and complain.
If it's a private residence belonging to neither of you, then you ask the owner to intervene. Follow the model above I outlined for businesses above.
If it's a private residence belonging to yourself. Tell them to stop it or leave. If they won't stop, tell them to leave. If they don't, call the police and explain that they're trespassing.
If it's a private residence belonging to them. Then leave
There are lots of other ifs in there, of course. What if they prevent you from calling the police? What if they prevent you from leaving, etc. If their actions go as far as turning into actual assault or kidnapping, then you can go the punching them in the face route and it becomes self defense. Plenty of people can't safely take this route, however, because there are plenty of people who are obnoxious trouble-making bullies who are also not, in fact, just cowards who will back down if you show some backbone. Some of them are just looking to manufacture an excuse to beat you up without technically throwing the first punch.
I suppose, from my point of view, pretty much all cases boil down to either the one where they're throwing the first punch in some sense (first actual assault at least), or you have another recourse.
On hitting animals vs. swerving off the road, I don't think you've considered how big moose and even deer can get. It's very situation dependent. You also have very little time to make the choice, and you're forgetting that the animal makes choices too.
You seem to be a very strong believer in the dominance of human free will. All very well and good, but the simple truth is that we can't really control our environment nearly as well as you seem to think. You make the best choices you can within the bounds of reason and with the information you have and try to deal with what life throws at you.
I remember one time driving in Florida on a bright sunny day without any apparent clouds when suddenly the skies opened and, for about two minutes the world was gone. Visibility wasn't good enough to see the road anymore. I managed to pull over to the side of the road and wait after a little while trying to even find the side of the road and dreading hitting a stopped car. After pulling over, I sat there dreading being hit by a still moving car. There was no good decision. Obviously speeding up was a stupid option that no-one would choose, but otherwise it was very hard to decide whether to slow down or not since drivers who didn't slow down could then hit you. There was just no way to predict what the best choice was and you had to gamble. The safest thing would have been for everyone in the downpour to stop dead where they were, obviously, but without any sort of communication, if.01% of drivers didn't, it would have probably been the most dangerous thing to do instead. Sometimes there are just no good answers.
I posted elsewhere in this discussion about an unpredictable and unavoidable (unless I'd just stayed at home) patch of ice I hit on a day where every other bit of road everywhere else was perfectly clear. Sometimes there just isn't anyone to blame. Sometimes people get sick and it isn't because a witchdoctor has cursed them or because the UN has deliberately infected the water supply. Sometimes machines have mechanical failures and it isn't because someone maintained them improperly or made a mistake making the parts, etc. Sometimes people get struck by lightning out of the clear blue sky. Sometimes people die because they put on their seatbelts (this is, of course, ridiculously rare compared to people being saved by their seatbelts) because no-one can predict the future except in generalities and by statistics and odds.
I think, given the disagreement on your claim, it would be best if you gave an actual cite that people could actually look up. Not just "it's in this other book", but actually something like "it's in section blah, subsection blahblah of California general law blahblahblah". That would clearly silence your critics if it confirms what you assert, and it would stop all this speculative back and forth.
I no longer have any tolerance for tailgaters since an incident a bit over a decade ago. I was on my way to work and there was a long stretch of road with a double yellow for no passing and no good place to stop or pull over. I was going 5-10 miles over the speed limit already, and I had a car right on my rear bumper the whole way. When we reached the stop sign at the end of the road, they hit my car from behind when I stopped, knocking me forward and jarring my foot momentarily off the brake. I ended up across half the road in front of me. Fortunately, the road was pretty clear except for one oncoming tractor trailer coming from my left which crossed over to the wrong side of the road to avoid hitting me. After that, I pulled over to the side of the road, expecting the car that had hit me to stop, and also to have a brief panic attack for myself. They didn't stop, but instead just headed on their way. To this day, I don't know what that person thought about nearly killing me.
As it turned out, they turned into the parking lot of my work. I still wonder if they thought nothing of the event or if they thought that they would just be able to go through the security gate and I wouldn't be able to follow, or what they thought. It's actually one of the regrets of my life that I just decided to let it be and not confront them about it. I never did actually see who it was, just their car, although it would have been easy to catch them coming out of the parking lot.
Anyway, since then, as I said, I have pretty much no sympathy for tailgaters. If they want to speed and I'm in their way, they can eat my bumper.
But, wouldn't that agree with the prior statement that it's ok to travel in the left lane unless you're going under the speed limit? After all, they would have to speed in order to pass you that way (and I know that everyone speeds to pass, but it's still technically illegal), so you wouldn't really be forcing them to pass on your right as they would have no business passing you.
I really don't like to hear that someone crashed "because it was raining/icy/snowy". They crashed because they were driving too fast for the conditions.
That's probably technically correct, but sometimes any speed at all is too fast for the conditions. In other words, you should just stay home. The problem is, it's hard to tell. You can sometimes tell because of weather reports and so forth, but those aren't 100% reliable and they don't cover the entire road.
I can provide a counter-example from when I was a teenage driver. I was out driving in winter, but there had been no recent snowfall or precipitation whatsoever. It was very cold, but the roads were dry and not icy anywhere. I came off the highway in a downward sloping offramp which hit a road at the bottom (it wasn't really a T-junction, more of a *-junction, actually, it sort of had 5 irregular branches). There was a puddle at the bottom of the ramp. I don't know where it came from. It was thin, but just thick enough that it was pure ice with no grip. It looked black and mirrorlike and was obviously super-slick, and there was no way to go around it. I was on a one-way ramp, so the only option was to cross it. It was perfectly clear that I wouldn't be able to brake properly on it. In retrospect, the safer thing to do would have been to time things right so that I didn't hit any traffic, ignore the stop sign at the bottom, and just shoot across the ice at normal speed until I reached traction on the other side, but that would have been illegal. Instead, I simply slowed way, way down until I was barely moving forward and pulled up to the stop sign and tried to stop. My car slowly and gracefully executed a spin of slightly over 180 degrees while sliding forward over the ice. There was absolutely no control whatsoever. The driver of a passing car (whose path I fortunately was not in) looked at me as if I were insane as he drove by. I regained control, and drove out with a few seconds to spare before the next car behind me on the off-ramp went through the exact same thing.
So, sometimes there are unavoidable safety hazards that you simply can't predict or avoid. In that incident, I ended up being completely out of control, drifting into a traffic lane and couldn't have avoided it (without breaking the law, but I didn't even think of that until after the fact. Fortunately, traffic was light and no-one hit me, but if I had been unlucky, there would have been nothing I could do.
So, I could have crashed because it was icy. I was lucky not to, but if I had, there would have been nothing I could have done to stop it. There were things I could have done to reduce the risk, of course, but that would have been a gamble, not a certainty. You can be unsympathetic all you want, sometimes things just happen.
we've released hundreds from GTMO, and many have returned to violence.
Maybe it depends a bit on how you define "many". I took what you wrote to imply that all those who had been released from Guantanamo Bay and then committed violence were necessarily returning to their old ways rather than possibly committing their first violent criminal acts. Our point of disagreement seems to come down to your "many". Did you mean the set of all people released from Guantanamo Bay who then went on to commit criminal acts of violence regardless of whether they were guilty of such acts before, or were you specifically referring to those who were definitely guilty in the past and then went on to commit further criminal acts? The former would seem to be tarring everyone with the same brush, and the latter would be splitting those released into three groups and ignoring one of the groups (the releases with no proven past crimes who then committed new ones). If you did mean the latter then I think I have to ask the perfectly valid question of how large the group of those who provably "returned" to violence is compared to the other two groups? If I have that information, then I can say whether I agree that it was "many of" those released, rather than say "a few", since such terms, in this context, are going to be relative to the actual number released.
Also, we may disagree on the term "released", or at least "released... from Gitmo". Your only actual example of that group were the ones "turned over to their host nation for prosecution". Although you could argue that, in the long run, that was tantamount to release, extradition and release are not really the same thing. At the very least, they were not "released... from Gitmo" but rather transferred elsewhere, then tried, possibly sentenced, punished (I don't argue that their punishment may well have been a joke), then released.
For the AQAP leaders you mentioned, "some of whom have been captured a second time", you haven't provided any explanation of why you consider them to have "returned" to violence.
So, based on my definition of "released... from Gitmo", which I think is very valid, you haven't actual given any real examples. Certainly there probably are some. But what's actually proven?
In the criminal justice system, there are some important principles that I'm sure you're aware of if you have worked on investigating these people for prosecution. One of the big ones is that people are innocent until proven guilty. It's a very important one. Those principles may not apply, however, if they were not in the criminal justice system. Do you argue that they were or were not in the criminal justice system? If not, then what system/legal framework were they in?
I would just like to interject here to point out several things:
First is that some people released from any prison after serving their sentences return to crime. Even if the crime rate among those released from prison were half that of the population at large, there would be people who would argue that prisoners should never be released because they may offend again. Eventually, unless they have a life sentence, you have to release prisoners and there's always a chance they will be back.
Second is that you're implying they "returned" to violence. Based on what I understand of the way the "illegal combatant" definition works, if they had anything on those people, they would never have been released. Unless new evidence has arisen, all there is to point to as proof that they actually had done something to be there is the fact that they're doing something now. That doesn't track for a few reasons. If you work under the assumption that they were innocent going in, you have to consider the psychological effects of years of forced deprivation on an innocent man. Most of us wouldn't really be all that calm and accepting of it. Next is the company they've been keeping during that time. It's generally considered a certainty that prisons are a great networking and indoctrination environment for criminals. It hones the criminal mind and introduces a prisoner, guilty or innocent, to all kinds of criminal contacts. Then of course there's gangs. Prisoners are often forced into joining gangs. Even those who don't actually join can find it very hard not to end up in a web of dependencies and obligations. Terrorist networks are essentially just a subset of gang, so, unless everyone is innocent _and_ the innocent don't form gangs while imprisoned to protect themselves from perceived threats (and they probably will), an innocent person sent through prison will come out with all kinds of gang or personal obligations that will be called in by people who are great friends if you toe the line, but become extremely, extremely unsympathetic if you choose to leave the fold. Then there's sudden culture shock. After years in prison, things will have changed. For Guantanamo Bay prisoners, one of those things might be their home country. Released due to lack of evidence or not, suspicion is guilt, and some of them have been released but not allowed back into their home country (or there's those who were supposed to be released, but were not because no country would take them) and, even if they are, they're released under a pall of suspicion, rejected by anyone who hates whatever group they might have belonged to, unable to find work, travel freely, etc. On the other hand, people sympathetic to the cause they were believed to belong to will treat them like heroes, even if they weren't really members. So, if it means acquiring a support network that's otherwise unavailable, then some will go that way. Not to mention that this same phenomenon can happen to the family of the prisoner while they're still incarcerated, then the group that supported their family while they were locked up has a claim on their support.
Basically, I just have a problem with the idea that, if someone who has never been proven guilty is released from prison and they commit a crime, anyone should be able to pounce on that fact and say "HA! Obviously they were guilty all along! This just proves we need longer sentences and harsher, more horrible prisons with extra rape."
Any information anywhere on how this telephone poll was conducted? Were people asked to name their single most admired person and that persons count was increased or they were added to the list? Or possibly asked for their top 3,5,7,10, etc. If we got to look at the raw data, would there be a thousands of outliers with a single vote (probably mostly consisting of peoples parents:) ) and a smaller cluster of people with multiple votes? Or, were people simply given a pre-compiled list of people and asked to rank them somehow? I think some variation on the pre-compiled list is probably a lot more likely. I also think it's pretty likely that this poll was conducted specifically on USA Today subscribers, so it will have a bias right off the bat.
You do understand that it's not just about the services that the particular taxpayer directly uses, right? It seems that you're saying that if your neighbor is 10X richer than you, and personally uses 2X as much in government services (a very difficult number to actually measure since, for example, it's really hard to say how much road someone uses up in a year), then they should only be paying 2X the taxes you are, and not 10X. All very well and good, but where does their money come from? Let's oversimplify and make this all about roads and say that this neighbor owns a trucking company. Let's also say that the trucking company pays no tax itself because all profit goes to operating expenses and salaries, particularly that large salary your neighbor makes (generally doesn't go that way in the real world, but this is just for illustration, the principle isn't changed by it). So, your neighbors large income means that there's a fleet of his trucks out there using the roads, and you have to tack that on to his personal use of tax-backed, government supplied infrastructure.
I'm not forgetting that "no one would be blown up if they obey the law". I am, incidentally, disagreeing with it. Any study on the worlds heavily mined areas is going to show you a heck of a lot of people killed of the years, plenty of them children, who were not the mines intended targets. Setting mines is indiscriminate and monstrous. While it's very noble of you to ascribe absolute independence and self-determination to all people, the reality is that sometimes people just get lost in the desert and miss signs, etc. Then, of course, there's children. There's the ones being carried by the adults who choose to break the law, then there's the possibility of children who choose to break the law and cross the border themselves. If you really and truly believe that mining the border is a good plan and would actually go forward with that plan given the chance and after full reflection on the consequences, then you're a monster. If you'd willfully murder people because of some minor bureaucratic infraction they're committing, there is no hope for your soul.
You might use the excuse that it wouldn't be murder because you would just be laying the trap, not springing it. That's ridiculous on its face. There was a bomber a few years back who would make bombs in test tubes that looked like shots of alcohol and leave them lying around nightclubs. People would pick them up thinking they were getting a free shot and have their hand blown off. By your reasoning, the bomber did nothing wrong because if those people hadn't been planning to take something that wasn't theirs, they wouldn't have been maimed, and the people who were picking them up to return them to the bar rather than drink them themselves (equivalent to people lost in the desert) were just collateral damage.
Also, it would open up anyone fully consenting to massive repression by family. If they insist that it was consensual, in many cases, they'll receive counseling tantamount to brainwashing for years. There will be guilt trips and threats of excommunication from the family. She will be made to feel that, if she affirms her consent, she'll be releasing a monstrous sexual predator who will rape someone not so willing next time and she'll be to blame for that girls suffering, etc.
I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the concept of "honor killings". It's not a phenomenon unique to Muslims as many people seem to think. It's a cross-cultural set of attitudes about the importance of a girls "virtue" and reputation and her obligation to her family and society in regards to it. In some places and among some people it's still taken to the extreme of murder for transgressions, but the exact same behavior, just to a lesser degree exists just about everywhere. I've met plenty of fathers of daughters of various ages in the US who are almost psychotically overprotective and who insist, in all seriousness, that their daughters have no sexual relations whatsoever and sometimes that they not date, etc. The behavior is always hypocritical with regards to their own behavior when they were younger and frequently their behavior as adults (with regards to enjoying pornography of young women, etc.). But they seem to view it as an obligation. Feeling protective of your child is, of course, not a shameful thing, but far too many tie such behavior to possessiveness and a form of objectification that denies their children their humanity.
Society in general seems to at least subconsciously share these values. A young woman, whether above or below the various ages of consent/adulthood/etc. who expresses her sexuality in some way, especially publicly, has to be either a victim, or a slut. Generally there is no middle ground, and when there is, it's often given by people who think that she's both a victim _and_ a slut.
So, an underage girl who chooses to have sex before her society says she's ready, whose older partner is arrested and who has a few years to decide whether to re-affirm consent or not, is going to have to spend that time under a lot of pressure. She will, essentially, have to decide whether to call herself a victim or a slut. Whether to be the dedicated family member protected from the outsider, or the prodigal child who shunned her families protection.
And there's absolutely nothing new about this behavior, it's as old as taboos against nudity. I'll show you mine if you show me yours. The difference now is that it's being done more and more via electronic devices with the bizarre consequence that acts which would otherwise be perfectly legal without the electronic image producing middleman become life-destroying felonies.
This, of course, is one of those things that varies tremendously by state. In Texas, I'm sure if someone knocks on your front door you can feed them alive to your dog. Generally speaking, in the US, setting booby traps, especially deadly ones, on your property is illegal, and it's some form of murder if they kill someone. Dogs are a bit of a special circumstance for some reason. There are all kinds of exceptions and special rules. Most jurisdictions in the US will hold you liable if you leave unsupervised dogs trained to attack and kill without a command. Attack dogs are usually legal, but they have to meet rigid training requirements, one of those requirements is that they don't attack unless they're told to. Untrained family dogs properly secured in your home are a different circumstance, a burglar who gets mauled or even killed by one doesn't get much sympathy, you're right. But _trained_ murder dogs, which attack indiscriminately are another matter.
In any case, I suppose that the US can put whatever they need on their border to "protect the country". The US has not, after all, joined the international treaty against landmines. Their argument was that they use smart landmines which would be remotely enabled only when needed and wouldn't blow up civilians, of course. So mining the border with Mexico specifically to blow up civilians would expose that as a pretty big lie. It would also be tantamount to a declaration of war against Mexico.
You seem to think the assumption that an employer is paying his taxes is some sort of extreme leap of logic. The impetus for this discussion seems to be the fact that penalties for employing illegal immigrants are not steep. On the other hand, penalties for tax evasion can be pretty severe. So the argument that an employer who hires illegals is just as likely to cheat on his taxes seems weak. Sure pulling it out seems to hurt the argument, but you can throw some spoiler argument out of nowhere into any discussion.
In any case an employer who cheats on his taxes, but does not employ illegals will still have to pay his employees under the table, otherwise won't the IRS wonder where he's getting the money to pay his employees? Even if he's paying them properly with withholding and everything it's not as if he's going to create an upward pressure on wages that way, it would just be neutral. Anyway, I'm not exactly convinced that anyone making that little is going to be be paying any taxes at all whether they're an illegal being paid under the table or if they're a documented worker getting a W2.
I don't think I'd be as argumentative about this if it weren't for the fact that so many of the anti-immigrant crowd weren't also die-hard, right wing, free market absolutist types, the personal philosophies of whom should dictate that all job markets are races to the bottom. We demand FREE MARKETS, and we demand that those free markets be PROTECTED!
Yeah, except the one naysayer scientist (chaos theory, the science that produces neat designs you can put on a t-shirt), who manages to give the impression that chaos theory is some sort of mathematical version of fatalism. Basically his theory seems to be that zoos are a logical impossibility.
Uh, yeah, because multi-ton animals with a nearly two year gestation period and which don't reach sexual maturity until a year or two later than humans are going to start spreading in the wilds of North America with no hope of stopping them. Yeah, that's not very likely.
Mutations rendering the vaccine ineffective is the reason why you have to vaccinate aggressively. If you leave a pathogen nowhere to live, then it has nowhere to mutate into a version that the vaccine is ineffective against.
Do you know what actually happens to you if you leave vicious dogs roaming your business at night and someone climbs your fence and gets torn apart by them? Or if you dig a bunch of pit traps with spikes on the bottom and put up a sign saying "beware of death traps"? The authorities, and juries are not very sympathetic towards you for engineering peoples deaths for minor infractions of the law.
I think a dedicated campaign by the US to murder Mexicans, even if they are crossing the border illegally, would end up leading to war with Mexico. Questions of whether or not Mexico could ever win aside, the cost in human lives and plain old money would not end up being cheaper by any stretch of the imagination.
Please, enlighten us, what slow but certain methods are there to becoming a US citizen? Remember, you said they were "certain" so nothing without at least a 70% acceptance rate please. Oh, also, what about people who don't want to become citizens but rather just want to come to the US and live and work, paying taxes and fulfilling all civic obligations, then go home?
But they have to be making little enough that their salary plus whatever the employer has to pay in taxes on it add up to less than a regular employee would get anyway. Otherwise, there would be no extra value to the employer in employing them (unless they work harder for the same pay, for example). Since the employer would have a higher tax rate than someone making that little, then anyone making the amount the illegals make plus what the employer pays in taxes would actually end up with more than the illegals as takehome pay because of their lower tax rate. In other words, if the illegals got the full amount their employers were paying out in salary + taxes and then paid the taxes themselves, they would actually end up with more money. So, they could afford to be paid even less and maintain their standard of living.
The fundamental problem here, as I see it, is that applying market forces to labor can lead to a "race to the bottom" and everyone recognizes this. Some of the people who recognize this, however, are dedicated right wing types who need to believe that market forces solve everything. Therefore, if things are broken, it must be the fault of externals who are fouling the system. The truth is that illegal immigrants aren't interfering with US capitalism, they're interfering with US socialism. If the anti-immigrant people weren't concerned with protecting socialism, they wouldn't be demanding the illegal immigrants be kicked out, they'd be demanding that the minimum wage laws be repealed so that they can compete (to be clear, I'm not advocating this, it's a terrible idea).
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I'm probably replying to this a bit late for anyone to actually read it, but here goes anyway.
It's good that you've provided a cite. Given the nature of the discussion, I think it's a little unreasonable for you to complain that people didn't look it up for you. If you're telling people that they're wrong and you're right in a situation where confusion and ambiguity is reasonable (for example if a state is apparently publishing multiple, contradictory bits of information on the same subject), it's a little unfair to tell people "you're wrong, and go look up the reason for yourself."
Anyway, on to the law itself. It still looks to me that the law doesn't quite say exactly what you said it does, and the law you've cited doesn't seem to cover all of your assertions. You wrote:
I'll start with the assertion that your cite doesn't cover at all. That is that "you are also legally obligated to PULL OVER AND LET CARS BEHIND YOU PASS when there are five or more of them behind you". The law you cited doesn't seem to say anything about pulling over to let people by, or name any particular number of cars. The law that mentions this is:
Which only covers two lane highways, and only when passing is actually unsafe. Also, only when there's either a marked area for the turnoff or it's "safe" to do so, which can cover a lot of ground. Also, this section does not mention that it's "notwithstanding the prima facie speed limits" and goes on to define slow moving in terms of "normal flow of traffic at the particular time and place." So, perhaps then "all of this is [not] COMPLETELY REGARDLESS OF SPEED LIMIT." Whether "normal" speed of traffic can be above the speed limits or not is a bit ambiguous. Seems to me that you could argue quite well that the fact that the "notwithstanding" is in the other section but not in this one, that it's intended that the speed limits be factored in. In any case, clearly "normal" isn't defined simply as how fast the cars behind want to go.
You seem to be correct that it's not illegal to pass on the right. I can't find any law against it per se. Of course, I can't find any actual exception to the speed limits, even when passing. So, even if the "normal" speed of traffic is 80, and you're passing someone who is going 65 in the left lane and you're at the "normal" speed of traffic, you're both breaking the law.
Finally, I'll address your principle assertion. The main position you've taken that people seem to be disagreeing with. That is that "In the state of California it is illegal to drive in the passing lane when someone else is going faster than you." The law you cited seems to actually completely disagree with that. It talks about "normal" speed of traffic, allowing it to be faster than the speed limit. If we assume "normal" speed to be the mean average speed of "traffic moving in the same direction at such time", then if there are exactly two cars on the road
Sure, but, in states without "fighting words" statutes, hitting them for it is usually a crime. There's almost always another way. Such as, if someone is blocking you from going to the bathroom:
If it's an actual public place, call a police officer and explain that they're disturbing the peace.
If it's a business owned "public place", tell the manager and have them thrown out, or at least made to step aside. If the manager won't, then you can leave and not patronize their business anymore, or contact whoever is above them and complain.
If it's a private residence belonging to neither of you, then you ask the owner to intervene. Follow the model above I outlined for businesses above.
If it's a private residence belonging to yourself. Tell them to stop it or leave. If they won't stop, tell them to leave. If they don't, call the police and explain that they're trespassing.
If it's a private residence belonging to them. Then leave
There are lots of other ifs in there, of course. What if they prevent you from calling the police? What if they prevent you from leaving, etc. If their actions go as far as turning into actual assault or kidnapping, then you can go the punching them in the face route and it becomes self defense. Plenty of people can't safely take this route, however, because there are plenty of people who are obnoxious trouble-making bullies who are also not, in fact, just cowards who will back down if you show some backbone. Some of them are just looking to manufacture an excuse to beat you up without technically throwing the first punch.
I suppose, from my point of view, pretty much all cases boil down to either the one where they're throwing the first punch in some sense (first actual assault at least), or you have another recourse.
On hitting animals vs. swerving off the road, I don't think you've considered how big moose and even deer can get. It's very situation dependent. You also have very little time to make the choice, and you're forgetting that the animal makes choices too.
You seem to be a very strong believer in the dominance of human free will. All very well and good, but the simple truth is that we can't really control our environment nearly as well as you seem to think. You make the best choices you can within the bounds of reason and with the information you have and try to deal with what life throws at you.
I remember one time driving in Florida on a bright sunny day without any apparent clouds when suddenly the skies opened and, for about two minutes the world was gone. Visibility wasn't good enough to see the road anymore. I managed to pull over to the side of the road and wait after a little while trying to even find the side of the road and dreading hitting a stopped car. After pulling over, I sat there dreading being hit by a still moving car. There was no good decision. Obviously speeding up was a stupid option that no-one would choose, but otherwise it was very hard to decide whether to slow down or not since drivers who didn't slow down could then hit you. There was just no way to predict what the best choice was and you had to gamble. The safest thing would have been for everyone in the downpour to stop dead where they were, obviously, but without any sort of communication, if .01% of drivers didn't, it would have probably been the most dangerous thing to do instead. Sometimes there are just no good answers.
I posted elsewhere in this discussion about an unpredictable and unavoidable (unless I'd just stayed at home) patch of ice I hit on a day where every other bit of road everywhere else was perfectly clear. Sometimes there just isn't anyone to blame. Sometimes people get sick and it isn't because a witchdoctor has cursed them or because the UN has deliberately infected the water supply. Sometimes machines have mechanical failures and it isn't because someone maintained them improperly or made a mistake making the parts, etc. Sometimes people get struck by lightning out of the clear blue sky. Sometimes people die because they put on their seatbelts (this is, of course, ridiculously rare compared to people being saved by their seatbelts) because no-one can predict the future except in generalities and by statistics and odds.
I think, given the disagreement on your claim, it would be best if you gave an actual cite that people could actually look up. Not just "it's in this other book", but actually something like "it's in section blah, subsection blahblah of California general law blahblahblah". That would clearly silence your critics if it confirms what you assert, and it would stop all this speculative back and forth.
Ah, the s/he was asking for it theory of assault. Very popular in certain circles.
I no longer have any tolerance for tailgaters since an incident a bit over a decade ago. I was on my way to work and there was a long stretch of road with a double yellow for no passing and no good place to stop or pull over. I was going 5-10 miles over the speed limit already, and I had a car right on my rear bumper the whole way. When we reached the stop sign at the end of the road, they hit my car from behind when I stopped, knocking me forward and jarring my foot momentarily off the brake. I ended up across half the road in front of me. Fortunately, the road was pretty clear except for one oncoming tractor trailer coming from my left which crossed over to the wrong side of the road to avoid hitting me. After that, I pulled over to the side of the road, expecting the car that had hit me to stop, and also to have a brief panic attack for myself. They didn't stop, but instead just headed on their way. To this day, I don't know what that person thought about nearly killing me.
As it turned out, they turned into the parking lot of my work. I still wonder if they thought nothing of the event or if they thought that they would just be able to go through the security gate and I wouldn't be able to follow, or what they thought. It's actually one of the regrets of my life that I just decided to let it be and not confront them about it. I never did actually see who it was, just their car, although it would have been easy to catch them coming out of the parking lot.
Anyway, since then, as I said, I have pretty much no sympathy for tailgaters. If they want to speed and I'm in their way, they can eat my bumper.
But, wouldn't that agree with the prior statement that it's ok to travel in the left lane unless you're going under the speed limit? After all, they would have to speed in order to pass you that way (and I know that everyone speeds to pass, but it's still technically illegal), so you wouldn't really be forcing them to pass on your right as they would have no business passing you.
somersault wrote:
That's probably technically correct, but sometimes any speed at all is too fast for the conditions. In other words, you should just stay home. The problem is, it's hard to tell. You can sometimes tell because of weather reports and so forth, but those aren't 100% reliable and they don't cover the entire road.
I can provide a counter-example from when I was a teenage driver. I was out driving in winter, but there had been no recent snowfall or precipitation whatsoever. It was very cold, but the roads were dry and not icy anywhere. I came off the highway in a downward sloping offramp which hit a road at the bottom (it wasn't really a T-junction, more of a *-junction, actually, it sort of had 5 irregular branches). There was a puddle at the bottom of the ramp. I don't know where it came from. It was thin, but just thick enough that it was pure ice with no grip. It looked black and mirrorlike and was obviously super-slick, and there was no way to go around it. I was on a one-way ramp, so the only option was to cross it. It was perfectly clear that I wouldn't be able to brake properly on it. In retrospect, the safer thing to do would have been to time things right so that I didn't hit any traffic, ignore the stop sign at the bottom, and just shoot across the ice at normal speed until I reached traction on the other side, but that would have been illegal. Instead, I simply slowed way, way down until I was barely moving forward and pulled up to the stop sign and tried to stop. My car slowly and gracefully executed a spin of slightly over 180 degrees while sliding forward over the ice. There was absolutely no control whatsoever. The driver of a passing car (whose path I fortunately was not in) looked at me as if I were insane as he drove by. I regained control, and drove out with a few seconds to spare before the next car behind me on the off-ramp went through the exact same thing.
So, sometimes there are unavoidable safety hazards that you simply can't predict or avoid. In that incident, I ended up being completely out of control, drifting into a traffic lane and couldn't have avoided it (without breaking the law, but I didn't even think of that until after the fact. Fortunately, traffic was light and no-one hit me, but if I had been unlucky, there would have been nothing I could do.
So, I could have crashed because it was icy. I was lucky not to, but if I had, there would have been nothing I could have done to stop it. There were things I could have done to reduce the risk, of course, but that would have been a gamble, not a certainty. You can be unsympathetic all you want, sometimes things just happen.
In your original post, you wrote:
Maybe it depends a bit on how you define "many". I took what you wrote to imply that all those who had been released from Guantanamo Bay and then committed violence were necessarily returning to their old ways rather than possibly committing their first violent criminal acts. Our point of disagreement seems to come down to your "many". Did you mean the set of all people released from Guantanamo Bay who then went on to commit criminal acts of violence regardless of whether they were guilty of such acts before, or were you specifically referring to those who were definitely guilty in the past and then went on to commit further criminal acts? The former would seem to be tarring everyone with the same brush, and the latter would be splitting those released into three groups and ignoring one of the groups (the releases with no proven past crimes who then committed new ones). If you did mean the latter then I think I have to ask the perfectly valid question of how large the group of those who provably "returned" to violence is compared to the other two groups? If I have that information, then I can say whether I agree that it was "many of" those released, rather than say "a few", since such terms, in this context, are going to be relative to the actual number released.
Also, we may disagree on the term "released", or at least "released ... from Gitmo". Your only actual example of that group were the ones "turned over to their host nation for prosecution". Although you could argue that, in the long run, that was tantamount to release, extradition and release are not really the same thing. At the very least, they were not "released ... from Gitmo" but rather transferred elsewhere, then tried, possibly sentenced, punished (I don't argue that their punishment may well have been a joke), then released.
For the AQAP leaders you mentioned, "some of whom have been captured a second time", you haven't provided any explanation of why you consider them to have "returned" to violence.
So, based on my definition of "released ... from Gitmo", which I think is very valid, you haven't actual given any real examples. Certainly there probably are some. But what's actually proven?
In the criminal justice system, there are some important principles that I'm sure you're aware of if you have worked on investigating these people for prosecution. One of the big ones is that people are innocent until proven guilty. It's a very important one. Those principles may not apply, however, if they were not in the criminal justice system. Do you argue that they were or were not in the criminal justice system? If not, then what system/legal framework were they in?
I would just like to interject here to point out several things:
First is that some people released from any prison after serving their sentences return to crime. Even if the crime rate among those released from prison were half that of the population at large, there would be people who would argue that prisoners should never be released because they may offend again. Eventually, unless they have a life sentence, you have to release prisoners and there's always a chance they will be back.
Second is that you're implying they "returned" to violence. Based on what I understand of the way the "illegal combatant" definition works, if they had anything on those people, they would never have been released. Unless new evidence has arisen, all there is to point to as proof that they actually had done something to be there is the fact that they're doing something now. That doesn't track for a few reasons. If you work under the assumption that they were innocent going in, you have to consider the psychological effects of years of forced deprivation on an innocent man. Most of us wouldn't really be all that calm and accepting of it. Next is the company they've been keeping during that time. It's generally considered a certainty that prisons are a great networking and indoctrination environment for criminals. It hones the criminal mind and introduces a prisoner, guilty or innocent, to all kinds of criminal contacts. Then of course there's gangs. Prisoners are often forced into joining gangs. Even those who don't actually join can find it very hard not to end up in a web of dependencies and obligations. Terrorist networks are essentially just a subset of gang, so, unless everyone is innocent _and_ the innocent don't form gangs while imprisoned to protect themselves from perceived threats (and they probably will), an innocent person sent through prison will come out with all kinds of gang or personal obligations that will be called in by people who are great friends if you toe the line, but become extremely, extremely unsympathetic if you choose to leave the fold. Then there's sudden culture shock. After years in prison, things will have changed. For Guantanamo Bay prisoners, one of those things might be their home country. Released due to lack of evidence or not, suspicion is guilt, and some of them have been released but not allowed back into their home country (or there's those who were supposed to be released, but were not because no country would take them) and, even if they are, they're released under a pall of suspicion, rejected by anyone who hates whatever group they might have belonged to, unable to find work, travel freely, etc. On the other hand, people sympathetic to the cause they were believed to belong to will treat them like heroes, even if they weren't really members. So, if it means acquiring a support network that's otherwise unavailable, then some will go that way. Not to mention that this same phenomenon can happen to the family of the prisoner while they're still incarcerated, then the group that supported their family while they were locked up has a claim on their support.
Basically, I just have a problem with the idea that, if someone who has never been proven guilty is released from prison and they commit a crime, anyone should be able to pounce on that fact and say "HA! Obviously they were guilty all along! This just proves we need longer sentences and harsher, more horrible prisons with extra rape."
Any information anywhere on how this telephone poll was conducted? Were people asked to name their single most admired person and that persons count was increased or they were added to the list? Or possibly asked for their top 3,5,7,10, etc. If we got to look at the raw data, would there be a thousands of outliers with a single vote (probably mostly consisting of peoples parents :) ) and a smaller cluster of people with multiple votes? Or, were people simply given a pre-compiled list of people and asked to rank them somehow? I think some variation on the pre-compiled list is probably a lot more likely. I also think it's pretty likely that this poll was conducted specifically on USA Today subscribers, so it will have a bias right off the bat.
You do understand that it's not just about the services that the particular taxpayer directly uses, right? It seems that you're saying that if your neighbor is 10X richer than you, and personally uses 2X as much in government services (a very difficult number to actually measure since, for example, it's really hard to say how much road someone uses up in a year), then they should only be paying 2X the taxes you are, and not 10X. All very well and good, but where does their money come from? Let's oversimplify and make this all about roads and say that this neighbor owns a trucking company. Let's also say that the trucking company pays no tax itself because all profit goes to operating expenses and salaries, particularly that large salary your neighbor makes (generally doesn't go that way in the real world, but this is just for illustration, the principle isn't changed by it). So, your neighbors large income means that there's a fleet of his trucks out there using the roads, and you have to tack that on to his personal use of tax-backed, government supplied infrastructure.
I'm not forgetting that "no one would be blown up if they obey the law". I am, incidentally, disagreeing with it. Any study on the worlds heavily mined areas is going to show you a heck of a lot of people killed of the years, plenty of them children, who were not the mines intended targets. Setting mines is indiscriminate and monstrous. While it's very noble of you to ascribe absolute independence and self-determination to all people, the reality is that sometimes people just get lost in the desert and miss signs, etc. Then, of course, there's children. There's the ones being carried by the adults who choose to break the law, then there's the possibility of children who choose to break the law and cross the border themselves. If you really and truly believe that mining the border is a good plan and would actually go forward with that plan given the chance and after full reflection on the consequences, then you're a monster. If you'd willfully murder people because of some minor bureaucratic infraction they're committing, there is no hope for your soul.
You might use the excuse that it wouldn't be murder because you would just be laying the trap, not springing it. That's ridiculous on its face. There was a bomber a few years back who would make bombs in test tubes that looked like shots of alcohol and leave them lying around nightclubs. People would pick them up thinking they were getting a free shot and have their hand blown off. By your reasoning, the bomber did nothing wrong because if those people hadn't been planning to take something that wasn't theirs, they wouldn't have been maimed, and the people who were picking them up to return them to the bar rather than drink them themselves (equivalent to people lost in the desert) were just collateral damage.
Also, it would open up anyone fully consenting to massive repression by family. If they insist that it was consensual, in many cases, they'll receive counseling tantamount to brainwashing for years. There will be guilt trips and threats of excommunication from the family. She will be made to feel that, if she affirms her consent, she'll be releasing a monstrous sexual predator who will rape someone not so willing next time and she'll be to blame for that girls suffering, etc.
I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the concept of "honor killings". It's not a phenomenon unique to Muslims as many people seem to think. It's a cross-cultural set of attitudes about the importance of a girls "virtue" and reputation and her obligation to her family and society in regards to it. In some places and among some people it's still taken to the extreme of murder for transgressions, but the exact same behavior, just to a lesser degree exists just about everywhere. I've met plenty of fathers of daughters of various ages in the US who are almost psychotically overprotective and who insist, in all seriousness, that their daughters have no sexual relations whatsoever and sometimes that they not date, etc. The behavior is always hypocritical with regards to their own behavior when they were younger and frequently their behavior as adults (with regards to enjoying pornography of young women, etc.). But they seem to view it as an obligation. Feeling protective of your child is, of course, not a shameful thing, but far too many tie such behavior to possessiveness and a form of objectification that denies their children their humanity.
Society in general seems to at least subconsciously share these values. A young woman, whether above or below the various ages of consent/adulthood/etc. who expresses her sexuality in some way, especially publicly, has to be either a victim, or a slut. Generally there is no middle ground, and when there is, it's often given by people who think that she's both a victim _and_ a slut.
So, an underage girl who chooses to have sex before her society says she's ready, whose older partner is arrested and who has a few years to decide whether to re-affirm consent or not, is going to have to spend that time under a lot of pressure. She will, essentially, have to decide whether to call herself a victim or a slut. Whether to be the dedicated family member protected from the outsider, or the prodigal child who shunned her families protection.
And there's absolutely nothing new about this behavior, it's as old as taboos against nudity. I'll show you mine if you show me yours. The difference now is that it's being done more and more via electronic devices with the bizarre consequence that acts which would otherwise be perfectly legal without the electronic image producing middleman become life-destroying felonies.
This, of course, is one of those things that varies tremendously by state. In Texas, I'm sure if someone knocks on your front door you can feed them alive to your dog. Generally speaking, in the US, setting booby traps, especially deadly ones, on your property is illegal, and it's some form of murder if they kill someone. Dogs are a bit of a special circumstance for some reason. There are all kinds of exceptions and special rules. Most jurisdictions in the US will hold you liable if you leave unsupervised dogs trained to attack and kill without a command. Attack dogs are usually legal, but they have to meet rigid training requirements, one of those requirements is that they don't attack unless they're told to. Untrained family dogs properly secured in your home are a different circumstance, a burglar who gets mauled or even killed by one doesn't get much sympathy, you're right. But _trained_ murder dogs, which attack indiscriminately are another matter.
In any case, I suppose that the US can put whatever they need on their border to "protect the country". The US has not, after all, joined the international treaty against landmines. Their argument was that they use smart landmines which would be remotely enabled only when needed and wouldn't blow up civilians, of course. So mining the border with Mexico specifically to blow up civilians would expose that as a pretty big lie. It would also be tantamount to a declaration of war against Mexico.
You seem to think the assumption that an employer is paying his taxes is some sort of extreme leap of logic. The impetus for this discussion seems to be the fact that penalties for employing illegal immigrants are not steep. On the other hand, penalties for tax evasion can be pretty severe. So the argument that an employer who hires illegals is just as likely to cheat on his taxes seems weak. Sure pulling it out seems to hurt the argument, but you can throw some spoiler argument out of nowhere into any discussion.
In any case an employer who cheats on his taxes, but does not employ illegals will still have to pay his employees under the table, otherwise won't the IRS wonder where he's getting the money to pay his employees? Even if he's paying them properly with withholding and everything it's not as if he's going to create an upward pressure on wages that way, it would just be neutral. Anyway, I'm not exactly convinced that anyone making that little is going to be be paying any taxes at all whether they're an illegal being paid under the table or if they're a documented worker getting a W2.
I don't think I'd be as argumentative about this if it weren't for the fact that so many of the anti-immigrant crowd weren't also die-hard, right wing, free market absolutist types, the personal philosophies of whom should dictate that all job markets are races to the bottom. We demand FREE MARKETS, and we demand that those free markets be PROTECTED!
Yeah, except the one naysayer scientist (chaos theory, the science that produces neat designs you can put on a t-shirt), who manages to give the impression that chaos theory is some sort of mathematical version of fatalism. Basically his theory seems to be that zoos are a logical impossibility.
Uh, yeah, because multi-ton animals with a nearly two year gestation period and which don't reach sexual maturity until a year or two later than humans are going to start spreading in the wilds of North America with no hope of stopping them. Yeah, that's not very likely.
Mutations rendering the vaccine ineffective is the reason why you have to vaccinate aggressively. If you leave a pathogen nowhere to live, then it has nowhere to mutate into a version that the vaccine is ineffective against.
But why is that relevant? Any employer can hide their income from the IRS, it's not a condition unique to employers of illegal immigrants.
Do you know what actually happens to you if you leave vicious dogs roaming your business at night and someone climbs your fence and gets torn apart by them? Or if you dig a bunch of pit traps with spikes on the bottom and put up a sign saying "beware of death traps"? The authorities, and juries are not very sympathetic towards you for engineering peoples deaths for minor infractions of the law.
I think a dedicated campaign by the US to murder Mexicans, even if they are crossing the border illegally, would end up leading to war with Mexico. Questions of whether or not Mexico could ever win aside, the cost in human lives and plain old money would not end up being cheaper by any stretch of the imagination.
Please, enlighten us, what slow but certain methods are there to becoming a US citizen? Remember, you said they were "certain" so nothing without at least a 70% acceptance rate please. Oh, also, what about people who don't want to become citizens but rather just want to come to the US and live and work, paying taxes and fulfilling all civic obligations, then go home?
But they have to be making little enough that their salary plus whatever the employer has to pay in taxes on it add up to less than a regular employee would get anyway. Otherwise, there would be no extra value to the employer in employing them (unless they work harder for the same pay, for example). Since the employer would have a higher tax rate than someone making that little, then anyone making the amount the illegals make plus what the employer pays in taxes would actually end up with more than the illegals as takehome pay because of their lower tax rate. In other words, if the illegals got the full amount their employers were paying out in salary + taxes and then paid the taxes themselves, they would actually end up with more money. So, they could afford to be paid even less and maintain their standard of living.
The fundamental problem here, as I see it, is that applying market forces to labor can lead to a "race to the bottom" and everyone recognizes this. Some of the people who recognize this, however, are dedicated right wing types who need to believe that market forces solve everything. Therefore, if things are broken, it must be the fault of externals who are fouling the system. The truth is that illegal immigrants aren't interfering with US capitalism, they're interfering with US socialism. If the anti-immigrant people weren't concerned with protecting socialism, they wouldn't be demanding the illegal immigrants be kicked out, they'd be demanding that the minimum wage laws be repealed so that they can compete (to be clear, I'm not advocating this, it's a terrible idea).