The point is that the VoidTurtle had no reason to say what they did, nor in the way they said it, except to try to remind us that “actually she broke the law so gotcha!”. This is true, but the law here is complete, hateful nonsense designed to validate the mistreatment and erasure of trans people and does not help protect anyone from anything. The state sent cops there to arrest her for washing her hands. It doesn’t help that cops have a history of not taking actual crimes seriously enough so that doesn’t help their case knowing that they seemed to have had no issue finding people to go do this job.
The underlying lesson is that if someone does something awful because some fucked up law permits them to do it then they still did that terrible thing and should be called out for it anyway. It was once perfectly legal to treat black people like less than full human beings but enough people said “no” while it was legal to get that changed. Imagine if someone was talking about how they helped lynch an escaped slave and when you challenged them on that VoidTurtle walked in like “actually that’s legal maybe the slave shouldn’t have tried to escape if they didn’t want to get killed.”
Legality does not equal morality, it simply often coincides with it and many times does not.
I think you’re wrong that void_turtle, whose account has black flag waving and who makes comments defending leftist activists and is clearly anti-police, is taking the position that the law is morality and that she deserves to be arrested … there are context clues, and I’m not sure why you don’t see them but your response to void_turtle seems unreasonable to me.
Rereading void_turtle’s comment:
The cops were only there because she sent the letter telling them when and where she would be doing this. Also a 60 day sentence would not be served in prison, but the county jail (they are different).
This response does not read to me as a defense of her arrest, but an explanation as to why she was even arrested in the first place. It’s a clarification, not a condemnation of her or a “gotcha” to justify her arrest. I don’t see how you could read it that way, to be honest.
Anyway, if I’m not mistaken, we’re all on the same page here, we all agree: fuck this law, fuck the cops, and this arrest is immoral.
Nobody here is arguing the law is moral or that breaking the law morally justifies arrest.
Because we know why she was arrested, it’s in the article. And frankly, even though she failed to understand it herself, I understand why making one’s civil disobedience known can be important. The question was about why cops were posted outside the bathroom and phrased with clear exasperation at how we’ve gotten to the point where we take the threat of handwashing so seriously.
What does VoidTurtle’s comment actually add to the conversation? I know what they said but I’d like to know why they felt the need to say it, and why they said it so coldly.
I… Am I the only one that is shocked by the fact that there are cops posted at BATHROOM??? The fuck??? (Also wtf do they have a law that say you can do prison if you step in the wrong bathroom???)
This was void_turtle’s response:
The cops were only there because she sent the letter telling them when and where she would be doing this. Also a 60 day sentence would not be served in prison, but the county jail (they are different).
Here’s how I interpret this:
you are shocked cops would be posted at the bathroom
this indicates you don’t understand why cops would be posted at the bathroom
void_turtle clarifies the reason: because she told them when and where she would be so they could arrest you
I do not experience void_turtle’s comment as cold or as inappropriate, they aren’t responding to your moral outrage, they are clarifying a fact and potential misunderstanding.
I also thought your original comment was confusion about why cops were posted, not just moral outrage that cops were posted in response to the letter.
void_turtle and I both seem to have interpreted your comment as being ignorant to the relevant facts, that she told anti-trans lawmakers where she was going to violate one of their anti-trans laws, which explains why the cops were posted there.
The response was nothing more than clarification, I really don’t interpret their comment as coldly dismissing your moral outrage, truly as only clarifying something they thought you didn’t know. We thought you hadn’t read the article, we thought your response indicated you didn’t know why the cops were posted to arrest her. (The article made it clear: the cops were posted because the anti-trans lawmakers asked them to arrest her if she broke the law she declared she would violate.)
Your moral outrage is justified (I’m with you - it’s insane), but I can’t tell if you are genuinely confused as to why anti-trans lawmakers would do something as immoral as assign cops to guard a bathroom and enforce a bathroom bill they passed?
VoidTurtle could have, at any time in their response, said “I know it’s crazy but…” though even still I think they would be completely missing that the original commentor is not confused about how it happened and more confused about how fucked up the many people are who actually deemed the situation dangerous enough send not even just one cop, but several.
There are also very often laws that are not enforced too strongly but exist to give people the option to enforce them, and how drastically they are enforced may change. Cops will almost never pull someone over for going a couple mph over the speed limit, for example, and I think we’d all be pretty fucking shocked if we got a ticket for 41mph in a 40mph zone, right?
Yes, it seems like void_turtle missed that you were not confused about why she was arrested and that you were only outraged that she actually was. (To be fair, I did too.)
The non-enforcement of laws is irrelevant here, why is it so hard for you to understand that anti-trans lawmakers want to put trans people in jail? These people literally wrote, voted for, and passed the bill they asked the cops to enforce. It’s a moral failure all the way down - but the fact that cops don’t enforce the law evenly or strictly feels really irrelevant right now.
It’s like being outraged that cops would arrest Black Lives Matter protestors because they don’t arrest motorists who kill bicyclists. Like, fucking duh. Do you realize the world you live in?
The lawmakers are anti-trans, they do not believe trans people should exist, they actively wish to “eradicate transgenderism from public life” - the goal is literally fucking genocide and you’re over here arguing with a trans women about how unbelievable it is that those same genocidal assholes who wrote the bills actually did something to make sure their laws were enforced (in a context where they were warned in advance about when and where their laws were about to be broken)?
This is reality, anti-trans lawmakers are trying to erase trans people from public life, and they’re doing it. Trans children are being forced to detransition, trans people in prisons are being forced to de-transition and undergo debunked and unethical conversion therapies, drag bans are being used to keep trans people from appearing at public events, and so on.
EDIT: lol, I missed that the first comment wasn’t yours (I’m sorry, ugh) … all the stranger it makes this whole interaction
It’s ok to get lost in the weeds.
The point is that the VoidTurtle had no reason to say what they did, nor in the way they said it, except to try to remind us that “actually she broke the law so gotcha!”. This is true, but the law here is complete, hateful nonsense designed to validate the mistreatment and erasure of trans people and does not help protect anyone from anything. The state sent cops there to arrest her for washing her hands. It doesn’t help that cops have a history of not taking actual crimes seriously enough so that doesn’t help their case knowing that they seemed to have had no issue finding people to go do this job.
The underlying lesson is that if someone does something awful because some fucked up law permits them to do it then they still did that terrible thing and should be called out for it anyway. It was once perfectly legal to treat black people like less than full human beings but enough people said “no” while it was legal to get that changed. Imagine if someone was talking about how they helped lynch an escaped slave and when you challenged them on that VoidTurtle walked in like “actually that’s legal maybe the slave shouldn’t have tried to escape if they didn’t want to get killed.”
Legality does not equal morality, it simply often coincides with it and many times does not.
I hope that clears things up.
oh, no - I understood your position then
I think you’re wrong that void_turtle, whose account has black flag waving and who makes comments defending leftist activists and is clearly anti-police, is taking the position that the law is morality and that she deserves to be arrested … there are context clues, and I’m not sure why you don’t see them but your response to void_turtle seems unreasonable to me.
Rereading void_turtle’s comment:
This response does not read to me as a defense of her arrest, but an explanation as to why she was even arrested in the first place. It’s a clarification, not a condemnation of her or a “gotcha” to justify her arrest. I don’t see how you could read it that way, to be honest.
Anyway, if I’m not mistaken, we’re all on the same page here, we all agree: fuck this law, fuck the cops, and this arrest is immoral.
Nobody here is arguing the law is moral or that breaking the law morally justifies arrest.
Because we know why she was arrested, it’s in the article. And frankly, even though she failed to understand it herself, I understand why making one’s civil disobedience known can be important. The question was about why cops were posted outside the bathroom and phrased with clear exasperation at how we’ve gotten to the point where we take the threat of handwashing so seriously.
What does VoidTurtle’s comment actually add to the conversation? I know what they said but I’d like to know why they felt the need to say it, and why they said it so coldly.
This was your comment:
This was void_turtle’s response:
Here’s how I interpret this:
I do not experience void_turtle’s comment as cold or as inappropriate, they aren’t responding to your moral outrage, they are clarifying a fact and potential misunderstanding.
I also thought your original comment was confusion about why cops were posted, not just moral outrage that cops were posted in response to the letter.
void_turtle and I both seem to have interpreted your comment as being ignorant to the relevant facts, that she told anti-trans lawmakers where she was going to violate one of their anti-trans laws, which explains why the cops were posted there.
The response was nothing more than clarification, I really don’t interpret their comment as coldly dismissing your moral outrage, truly as only clarifying something they thought you didn’t know. We thought you hadn’t read the article, we thought your response indicated you didn’t know why the cops were posted to arrest her. (The article made it clear: the cops were posted because the anti-trans lawmakers asked them to arrest her if she broke the law she declared she would violate.)
Your moral outrage is justified (I’m with you - it’s insane), but I can’t tell if you are genuinely confused as to why anti-trans lawmakers would do something as immoral as assign cops to guard a bathroom and enforce a bathroom bill they passed?
The first comment was not mine.
VoidTurtle could have, at any time in their response, said “I know it’s crazy but…” though even still I think they would be completely missing that the original commentor is not confused about how it happened and more confused about how fucked up the many people are who actually deemed the situation dangerous enough send not even just one cop, but several.
There are also very often laws that are not enforced too strongly but exist to give people the option to enforce them, and how drastically they are enforced may change. Cops will almost never pull someone over for going a couple mph over the speed limit, for example, and I think we’d all be pretty fucking shocked if we got a ticket for 41mph in a 40mph zone, right?
Yes, it seems like void_turtle missed that you were not confused about why she was arrested and that you were only outraged that she actually was. (To be fair, I did too.)
The non-enforcement of laws is irrelevant here, why is it so hard for you to understand that anti-trans lawmakers want to put trans people in jail? These people literally wrote, voted for, and passed the bill they asked the cops to enforce. It’s a moral failure all the way down - but the fact that cops don’t enforce the law evenly or strictly feels really irrelevant right now.
It’s like being outraged that cops would arrest Black Lives Matter protestors because they don’t arrest motorists who kill bicyclists. Like, fucking duh. Do you realize the world you live in?
The lawmakers are anti-trans, they do not believe trans people should exist, they actively wish to “eradicate transgenderism from public life” - the goal is literally fucking genocide and you’re over here arguing with a trans women about how unbelievable it is that those same genocidal assholes who wrote the bills actually did something to make sure their laws were enforced (in a context where they were warned in advance about when and where their laws were about to be broken)?
This is reality, anti-trans lawmakers are trying to erase trans people from public life, and they’re doing it. Trans children are being forced to detransition, trans people in prisons are being forced to de-transition and undergo debunked and unethical conversion therapies, drag bans are being used to keep trans people from appearing at public events, and so on.
EDIT: lol, I missed that the first comment wasn’t yours (I’m sorry, ugh) … all the stranger it makes this whole interaction