If you’re involved in any kind of protest, the phone number of a lawyer. Hell, generalize this. Make sure you memorize numbers of at least the first few of your emergency contacts. You never know when you will be separated from your phone.

No.

Found the Republican.

How does one determine if the killer killed the woman because he hated her and not just for fun?

What have you read on the legal basis of hate crime laws? What have you done yourself in order to answer your own questions?

No. You are just susceptible to right wing issue framing.

It does. Laws like this are always written gender neutral. Same thing with laws banning discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. It’s just as illegal to fire someone for being straight as it is to fire them for being gay.

These laws are always written to protect everyone. But conservatives such as yourself will read a headline and then whine about minority groups receiving “special treatment.”

These laws already are gender neutral, just like all anti discrimination laws.

I’ll come burn a cross on your lawn and then insist I can’t be charged with anything other than violating local fire ordinances…

Murder’s murder, in the eyes of many

You’re right! That’s why we should prosecute all traffic deaths as first degree murder. Someone drunkenly stumbles into the road, into your path, causing you to run them over and kill them? Mandatory minimum life sentence for you. After all, death is death, killing is killing. We don’t give a shit about people’s motives.

Ah yes, I remember reading in history class about that time Stalin and Hitler signed a secret treaty to divide up the territory of the Portland metropolitan area. :D

Foreign terrorist groups can be prosecuted, and the president has a much freer hand constitutionally going after foreign than domestic groups. There is no actual federal law to designate and go after domestic terrorist groups. But there is for foreign.

Here is the plan:

1. Designate a handful of foreign branches of antifa as terrorist groups.

2. If anyone in the US is a member of an antifa group, arrest them for being member of a foreign terrorist group, even if the group they are a part of is completely unconnected to the European groups.

3. Make the defendants spend thousands of dollars and years of their lives fighting anti-terrorism charges, and get “arrested for terrorism” as part of their criminal records.

No you are confused. You can prosecute born US citizens for being a member of a foreign terrorist group.

Who said anything about foreign action? I just told you exactly what the purpose of this rule is. It’s to maliciously prosecute domestic peaceful protesters. This isn’t some farce or distraction. It’s the core purpose of the thing.

The point isn’t to actually go after these specific tiny foreign groups. The goal is to brand any organization that’s labeled “Antifa” as a foreign terrorist group. There could be some non violent antifa group in Portland, with no ties to any foreign organization whatsoever. The DOJ can go in, arrest all members, and charge them with terrorism for being members of a foreign terrorist group. Would these charges actually stick in court? No. After years and tens of thousands in attorneys fees, the charges will be dropped. But the process is the punishment.

You know what. Maybe it should be!

I have an idea for a bold new law. Let’s help desperate people, add more whimsy to the world, and maybe help some folks discover something about themselves.

New Law:
You can legally claim your dead relative’s social welfare benefits for up to five years after their death…but you have to dress up and present as them full time!

Scared and desperate people do scared and desperate things. For all we know, this was this guy’s only way of keeping a roof over his head.

I used to put it on my resume and the kind of offers I would get…where VERY bad. Or had some huge red flags.

In what way, someone looking for people to hack old banking systems?

2040: A group of Neo-Bolsheviks seize control of Russia, fully intending to literally make fully automated luxury gay space communism real. Imagine a publicly owned vast automated supply chain that produced goods at scale with little human effort. Go full tilt on automation of all kinds, but direct all profits to the general welfare. Maybe do away with money entirely. It would start with a genuine utopian dream.

2060: Neo-Stalin rules over what was once Russia. Its human population, long since more trouble than they were worth, were largely done away with. The population of the country is approximately 2300. Yet the combined industrial output of the automated leviathan that sprawls over what was once the Moscow-St. Petersburg corridor now exceeds that of the PRC. And a frightening fraction of that is directed towards military purposes. Their population reduced to a handful of oligarchs still controls the first, second, or third most powerful military in the world, depending on form of measure.

Be careful what you wish for. We might end up with Soviet Union Two: Electric Boogaloo.

There are none. That doesn’t stop bigots from pretending trans women on estrogen have any advantage.