Eh, not quite. I’d say a better analogy involves the posts being “I have a (insert car model here) and the brakes are making worrying squealing noises”, and “Hi, here’s a (link) to a trade-in offer for a model of car that’s much less likely to have the brakes fail on you. It won’t even cost you anything to swap except 30 minutes of your time.”

The problem is, there’s no immediately visible option to stop this crap; stopping said crap therefore takes time, which is an individual person’s single most valuable resource. People have to go searching through settings or go googling ‘how do I do this’ in order to disable this, and even that slight inconvenience means there’s going to be a lot of people that want to disable it, but end up not bothering, and that’s not a good thing. Rule of thumb, if it’s not absolutely trivial to do on a whim, it may as well be impossible.

Unfortunately true. Paradox of tolerance: Civilization can tolerate a lot of things, but it can’t tolerate the intolerant. If it tries to tolerate the intolerant, it dies.

There’s just something about ‘you can throw the second punch but not the first’ that Republicans can’t seem to get through their tiny little peanut brains.

Heh. Heh heh. You think that you can… file a complaint, and get a fine dismissed just like that. Heh heh heh. God, you’re naive. Or stupid. Or a paid propagandist. Or just plain rich enough for your reaction to a fine to be ‘meh’.

Criminality is predicated on convenience. If it’s easy for an authority to throw out fines and hard for the populace to dismiss those fines, guess what’s going to happen? There’s going to be fines applied that shouldn’t have been, but that the people who are getting fined literally can’t put in the effort to get dismissed. And that’s not justice in the slightest. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’, you troll. Heard that phrase before??

Allow me to rephrase that. If an authority figure wants to prosecute you for whatever reason, even if you’ve been perfectly “legal”, they will make up a crime you committed based on something they didn’t like about you. This driving-camera crap just gives them more opportunities.

I got ticketed not too long ago because a police officer thought I was texting when I wasn’t doing anything other than looking at Google Maps. You don’t have to have committed a crime. You just have to have yourself recorded in a way that looks like you might have committed a crime. There is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE between those qualifiers, and it is ripe for abuse. Innocence doesn’t prove innocence, and proving innocence is what matters.

How does one find those few people? And how can they be worked against? I honestly don’t know and I don’t know how to find out. Do I ask ChatGPT???

Shit, maybe I should ask ChatGPT…

Don’t tell me what to do.

My only quibble with your post is your portrayal of Republicans’ general philosophy, in the last paragraph. Political conservatism, in my opinion which has recently been heavily influenced by the above link, is instead ‘conserving political power for yourself’. Because that’s what Republicans are doing. They want the power, and they don’t care what they do to get it. If they make a pandemic worse to get more power? That’s fine. Spur global warming past feedback thresholds in the process of getting more power? Who cares, they got more power. In the pursuit of the ‘right’ people telling the ‘wrong’ people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the ‘wrong’ people from telling the ‘right’ people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder… anything goes.

Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).

Don’t tell me what to do.

They don’t care if you’re a leftist or not, they care that you’re telling them what to do, precisely because they don’t want to be told what to do, even if it’s good for them, because if they’re being told what to do, it means they aren’t in power, and they want power at any cost. In the pursuit of the ‘right’ people telling the ‘wrong’ people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the ‘wrong’ people from telling the ‘right’ people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder… anything goes.

Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).

Don’t tell me what to do.

Of course they mock you for washing your hands! Telling them to wash their hands and wear masks so they don’t get COVID and fucking die, is still ‘telling them to do something’, and (/s) that’s terrible (/s). In the pursuit of the ‘right’ people telling the ‘wrong’ people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the ‘wrong’ people from telling the ‘right’ people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder… anything goes.

Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).

Don’t tell me what to do.

This is the actual Republican platform. They don’t care a whit about what we consider to be ‘problems’. The only thing they think is problematic is that they might not have power, and that we might have power. In the pursuit of the ‘right’ people telling the ‘wrong’ people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the ‘wrong’ people from telling the ‘right’ people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder… anything goes.

Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).

Don’t tell me what to do.

You are absolutely correct. For Republicans, in the pursuit of the ‘right’ people telling the ‘wrong’ people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the ‘wrong’ people from telling the ‘right’ people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder… anything goes.

Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).