this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

haha, that sounds like me - sorry for the essay 🙈

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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:

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This was your comment:

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

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?