you don’t think the arm population would immediately be on edge?

Not meaningfully. As we’ve seen time and time again, the 2A crowd is perfectly content to allow the state to be as authoritarian as it likes, so long as it’s hurting those pesky undesirables.

The 2A crowd didn’t do shit when the 1985 move bombing happened. They didn’t do shit when DeSantis started harrasing people with cops in their own homes for using their 1A rights. They didn’t do shit when pro-palestinian protesters were getting the shit beat out of them by cops for using their 1A rights. They didn’t do shit for the myriad of bullshit wars the U.S. was involved in. They didn’t do shit when it came out how many countries the CIA destabilized in Latin America. The nth time will be no different.

The authoritarians have little to fear, because the group that likes to act like they would keep that in check fully support it.

The hard part is getting people to join you to take a stand. To make real change it has to be a significant portion of the population demanding change.

Not really. They’ve got more than enough cops to hit more than one house at a time. In Florida they have about 50k cops. If they sent 10 at a time per house, that’s 5000 homes they could invade at a time. That’s not hesitant or delayed at all.

Abolish the stock market.

If DeSantis wants to put the state in marshal law he would have to convince the armed citizens of the state that that is ok,

No he doesn’t. All he has to do is send cops to people’s homes, one by one, like he just did. Nobody is going to meaningfully stand up to the police if they take people one at a time, one house at a time.

so expect hesitation on following some orders.

There’s no reason for there to be any more hesitation. Cops already believe themselves to be doing the most dangerous job, and they outgun you when they show up to your house. For them it’s just another day.

But the 2nd amendment doesn’t increase the cost of authoritarian action. DeSantis just sent rounds of police to people’s homes for signing petitions to put abortion on the ballot in Florida.

The 2nd amendment didn’t do jack shit to stop him from threatening people for their free speech. Because if a squad of a dozen cops lands on your front door, whether you like it or not you’re either going to be shot, detained, your guns taken away, etc. Having a gun doesn’t change that. You’re fucked, gun or not, if the state sends armed personnel to your home.

And arguably you’re more fucked if you have a gun because of how trigger happy cops are. The moment they think you’re armed they’ll shoot you.

Oh I know, I’m right there with you. But I get a level of entertainment out of it.

Ah, my bad, I missed that.

And heretics

Given that a large amount of humans in the imperium are esentially slave laborers and menial workers, treated only marginally better than livestock, I don’t know about that.

But it also varies quite a bit from world to world. I’m sure some are good about it.

I don’t think the people who are supporters of jury nullification are saying such laws are fine.

I disagree. Laws aren’t always moral. Texas could outlaw donations to the Rainbow Railroad and it would be wrong, the organization should still exist.

But in this case it is pretty clear that the plagiarism machine is in fact, bad and should not exist, at least not in it’s current form.

Most people live in cities.

They absolutely did want to squeeze every last drop out of you. They’ve never not. The only difference is that we’ve had decades of regulatory capture, unrestricted corporate mergers, and lower tax rates for the rich. So now they’re free to squeeze much harder than they have previously.

Good. I hope they get the benefits they deserve.

They didn’t mention personal stuff

I can’t say I’m familiar with that particular event. But I’m guessing there is a difference there in that iMessage is well, a messaging service. YouTube isn’t, their videos are on public webpages.

All Freetube and company needs to do, if it comes to it, is find a way extract a video from a public webpage. There’s a million ways to do that.

iMessage is not a public webpage, and so there is no real way around it unless you go through their api.

Youtube/google/alphabet are almost certainly aware it exists already. The only real risk is too many people switching to it.

But even then there isn’t much they can do to stop it’s use. They can’t tighten up or remove their api, but then page scraping will take over. They can obfuscation their page, but that will not work forever.

It’s a cat and mouse game that is impossible to win for them.

What I’m trying to get at is that all the aesthetics are there for a conservative to read it in a way that is compatible with their ideology

I agree that’s the case. What I disagree on is the vagueness of the values of Star Fleet/The Federation, and how much of it we see in effect. There is plenty both on screen and off screen to see.

vague enough and alien enough to not map 1-to-1 onto any modern political system.

Sure, it doesn’t map one to one. But it also makes it very clear that conservatives values are wholely incompatible with Federation philosophy. It’s a psuedo democratic socialist state.