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infected slut princess
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Post by infected slut princess » Fri Aug 02, 2013 6:47 pm

Yeah, I guess the FBI must be telling the truth, like the time they told the truth about having never heard of the Tsarnaev bros before the Boston Bombing. Oh wait.
The FBI lies all the time. You are a retard for believing what they say.

> Oh, then you are an idiot. Because infected slut princess has never posted anything worth reading at any time.

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Whatever
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Post by Whatever » Fri Aug 02, 2013 7:13 pm

But we should trust a random lady's account of what her husband told her that some people told him? Yeah, fuck you too.
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infected slut princess
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Post by infected slut princess » Fri Aug 02, 2013 7:34 pm

If you'd take a look at the real world instead of watching grandpa porn all day, you might realize a random person is more credible than a government official 99.917% of the time.

> Oh, then you are an idiot. Because infected slut princess has never posted anything worth reading at any time.

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ishy
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Post by ishy » Fri Aug 02, 2013 10:29 pm

> infected slut princess wrote:If you'd take a look at the real world instead of watching grandpa porn all day, you might realize a random person is more credible than a government official 99.917% of the time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrF5x1OSJuQ
Last edited by ishy on Fri Aug 02, 2013 10:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

> Gary Gygax wrote:The player’s path to role-playing mastery begins with a thorough understanding of the rules of the game

> Bigode wrote:I wouldn't normally make that blanket of a suggestion, but you seem to deserve it: scroll through the entire forum, read anything that looks interesting in term of design experience, then come back.

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Sigil
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Post by Sigil » Sat Aug 03, 2013 3:12 am

> infected slut princess wrote:Yeah, I guess the FBI must be telling the truth, like the time they told the truth about having never heard of the Tsarnaev bros before the Boston Bombing. Oh wait.
> The FBI lies all the time. You are a retard for believing what they say.

The FBI being involved or not is tangental to wether they were spying on citizens in this case. In this case information was first gathered by a company on its employee, neither party of which is government. The fact that this information was reported to a governmental agency, regardless of which, does not indicate spying.
The question here is wether the company was justified (morally) in involving police/FBI in this matter, which we do not have enough information to judge. His searching for "pressure cooker bombs" and "backpacks" could have been part of a pattern of similar searches potentially indicative of a disgruntled employee considering committing a crime, or it could have simply been within the normal parameters of someone who likes looking up science-y shit and hiking apparel and was amid searches of "mythbusters blowing up shit" and "apples getting shot in slow motion". We simply do not know.
Last edited by Sigil on Sat Aug 03, 2013 3:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Almaz
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Post by Almaz » Mon Aug 05, 2013 1:18 am

> Whatever wrote:

> > Josh_Kablack wrote:I'm all for people leaking information from within organizations I do not belong to, and adamantly opposed to people leaking information from within organizations which I do belong to.

> I'm all for people using prepositions to end their sentences with.

“This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.” - Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
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infected slut princess
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Post by infected slut princess » Mon Aug 05, 2013 7:26 pm

Sigil: I... kind of lost track of what this argument was about. I said originally that the updated info to the story shared by Whatever (about the employer seeing something then saying something) made the story seem worse. "OMG TIHS GUY LOOKD EUP PRESSUER COOKER BOMBOS and BACKPACK ON GOOGLE!! HE MIHGT BE TEH TERRORIST!!!" Having armed thugs of the state show up because of a google search, whether at home or at the office, is the epitome of retardation.
I also questioned whether that was the _only_ source of information that prompted the goons with badges and guns to show up. I don't think it was. When she inquired, Catalano said "We found out through the the Suffolk Police Department that the searches involved also things my husband looked up at his old job" (emphasis mine). It's hard to know the truth in a situation like this. After all, you are dealing with lying bureaucrats.
But either way, whether the goons with badges and guns showed up because of some XKeyscore-type-thing or because of Wretched Hag Queen Napolitano's "If you see something say something," or some mixture, it is troubling for Americans and others concerned about the powers exercised by the state for the sake of its bullshit War on Terror.
EDIT: For those who missed the Xkeyscore thing, it's rather troubling: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/j ... nline-data
Last edited by infected slut princess on Mon Aug 05, 2013 7:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

> Oh, then you are an idiot. Because infected slut princess has never posted anything worth reading at any time.

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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Mon Aug 05, 2013 8:39 pm

ISP, a lot of the things you are saying are really stupid. Half of your post is just bullshit buzzwording without a hint of coherence behind it. You seriously felt the need to elaborate that the police who did this were "armed" and had "badges and guns," which is something that is true of every police officer in the United States. We arm all of them. We give all of them badges. You describe them as "thugs" and "goons," but all they actually did was show up, ask for permission to search, receive permission to search, skip rooms on the homeowner's request, and not touch any of the computers. You can find actual examples of police acting like dangerous armed thugs. See all of our no-knock SWAT raids. This is not one of those times.
But as for the actual substance of your post that isn't just I HAVE SCARY WORDS BE AFRAID, I have no idea why you think Catalano has privileged information on what motivated them to question her or her husband. Indeed, given the fact that she was completely wrong the first time she guessed why this happened she clearly does not have any such inside information. Her use or not use of the word "also" really means fuck all, because it is her speculation and has been her speculation from the start.
Police received a tip about a suspicious search and did a non-compulsory, non-intrusive follow-up. You can complain that police responded to a tip that did not have a lot of weight, but I would point out we have no idea what the employers told the police and that in the context of receiving a tip of unknown validity and unknown severity a non-compulsory, non-intrusive follow-up is basically ideal. I do not know what you actually would have wanted to happen here, because most of your complaints really boil down to "police exist hubloobloobloo armed thugs."
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hyzmarca
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Post by hyzmarca » Tue Aug 06, 2013 12:47 am

I will agree that a culture of tattling and snitching is damaging to trust and social cohesion. When you're paranoid that your neighbors or your employer might inform the police about you, it really erodes essential community bonds that rely on trust.
In an ideal world you can go to your boss when you've got a body in your trunk and get help disposing of it. But that's a very different one from the world where your boss reports your internet searches to the police.
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John Magnum
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Post by John Magnum » Tue Aug 06, 2013 1:11 am

> hyzmarca wrote:In an ideal world you can go to your boss when you've got a body in your trunk and get help disposing of it.

I do not understand why this would be an ideal world.
-JM
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Chamomile
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Post by Chamomile » Tue Aug 06, 2013 1:48 am

I assume it's a critical typo, but maybe in an ideal world deception and crime are so unheard of that your boss can safely assume that you need to dispose of a body for some perfectly legal and incredibly unlikely set of circumstances?
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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History » Tue Aug 06, 2013 1:51 am

Deep Cuts In A Lovecraftian Vein
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Prak
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Post by Prak » Tue Aug 06, 2013 2:00 am

Or maybe in an ideal world you're a career criminal
Last edited by Prak on Tue Aug 06, 2013 2:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.

> Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.

> FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
> You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.

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infected slut princess
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Post by infected slut princess » Tue Aug 06, 2013 2:18 am

DSMatticus: People with badges and guns are scary and dangerous, especially when they are fighting wars (against drugs, terror, etc). In my view it is bad to have armed agents of the state show up at your house for no good reason. You would probably agree with that. Sorry you don't like my style, but you don't need to waste time complaining about it.
As for Catalano, I think you are missing a few elements to the story. The way I understand it is when the investigators came to her house, they led the husband to believe they were being visited because of internet searches made in their home. If this is what the investigators told them, then their belief was indeed wrong, but not due to their own faulty reasoning. They simply took for granted the investigators were truthful on that issue. Now, apparently when the former employer angle to the story began to emerge, they later inquired with the Suffolk Police and they were told there were "also" searches made at the husband's old job that prompted their little visit. Did she make up that part of the story? I don't know, maybe. I don't have any particular reason to think so at the moment.
But in any case, all the possibilities, be it Xkeyscore or "see something say something" or both or some other thing... they're all bad.
Is what I would have actually wanted to happen really so mysterious? Government agents with badges and guns should not show up at people's houses because of google searches. That is fucking stupid.

> Oh, then you are an idiot. Because infected slut princess has never posted anything worth reading at any time.

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Chamomile
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Post by Chamomile » Tue Aug 06, 2013 3:22 am

If government agents show up at my house, they had better have badges. If they don't, I will call the police and inform them that someone has come to my house claiming to be government agents in an attempt to break in. And if a man whose job requires him to carry a gun walks up to my door with his gun in the holster and says "we'd like to take a look around if that's alright with you" then I don't actually care what his reasons are. I don't care if they're searching houses at random, if they don't actually enter the house without permission of the residents then there's basically no way the scenario can be phrased that makes them jackbooted stormtroopers.
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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Tue Aug 06, 2013 4:11 am

> isp wrote:DSMatticus: People with badges and guns are scary and dangerous, especially when they are fighting wars (against drugs, terror, etc). In my view it is bad to have armed agents of the state show up at your house for no good reason. You would probably agree with that. Sorry you don't like my style, but you don't need to waste time complaining about it.

There are certainly arguments for disarming police who are performing routine, relatively safe duties. That is not what you are bitching about. What you are bitching is that in a country where every police officer is armed, the police officers who showed up to perform this specific routine, relatively safe duty were armed. There are only two options in the U.S.: the police do it with a gun on their person or the police do not do at all. Complaining that the police did X and had guns while doing it is bullshit. You can argue that the police should not have done X, at which point their guns are irrelevant and you are buzzwording. You can argue that the police should not be so well-armed while doing a certain subset of their duties, at which point you are no longer talking about whether or not it was appropriate for them to do X or not. There is no sane way to twist this and make the guns the police had relevant to whether or not they should have visited the Catalano's.
Chamomile covered the rest. But anyway, your "style" is to suggest that police performing non-mandatory searches and questioning while as lightly equipped as they could ever be while on duty is an example of state overreach. That is incomprehensible. But I will agree that complaining about stupid things people say on the internet is a waste of time.

> isp wrote:As for Catalano, I think you are missing a few elements to the story. The way I understand it is when the investigators came to her house, they led the husband to believe they were being visited because of internet searches made in their home.

This is the blog post. It does not say what you think it does. At no point does the claim that the police investigated their house because of their home google searches exist anywhere outside the realm of Mrs. Catalano's speculation. That is not to say her reasoning was particularly faulty. That is not to say she made anything up. In the absence of information she made a guess, and later information stopped being absent and the guess she made turned out to be wrong (or at least, suspect and no longer a necessary component).

> isp wrote:Is what I would have actually wanted to happen really so mysterious? Government agents with badges and guns should not show up at people's houses because of google searches. That is fucking stupid.

No, a company reported that someone they had recently fired had been googling pressure cooker bombs on their work computer, and were concerned enough about this to meet with police about the employee (i.e. Mr. Catalano). Now, I don't actually know the timeframe (if the google searches happened the day he got his pinkslip, I'd be pretty fucking suspicious as an employer too) and I don't know what the police and the employer talked about in their meeting. But police received some sort of information about a potentially disgruntled employee and a tiny bit of suspicious behavior, and chose to ask him to cooperate. And he did. And then everyone realized it was a silly mistake and went on with their lives. That is as good as it gets. It's certainly better than a no-knock SWAT raid. It's certainly better than "Oh? You think someone you fired might try and blow up your office and was google searching how to make bombs? Not enough can't help you good luck bye."
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infected slut princess
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Post by infected slut princess » Tue Aug 06, 2013 5:06 am

DSMAtticus: I am a gentle, peace-loving anarchist and I don't think the state's agents should have any weapons. Chamomile completely misunderstands -- if someone is coming to help you, a badge is not important. But if someone wants to use violence against you while enforcing unjust laws, a badge is supposedly what lets people do that. The guns the police have are ALWAYS relevant.
But that is another issue. Regarding this situation, I see why you lean towards the wild speculation interpretation. That's actually not entirely unreasonable. But she says they were "led to believe" the searches were from home so if that's the case, then the agents must have said some things that made them think that. Honestly it's not super important.
What is important is whether it's appropriate to send a gang of six armed state agents to someone's house for google searches. The answer is no, it's really quite ridiculous and unjustified no matter how reasonable you think it is. The only proper police answer to "Hey some former employee looked up pressure cooker bombs and backpacks on the internet at work" is to say, "So fucking what." Not to send six dudes with badges and guns (why not show up with one dude, or two dudes... why six? After all, it might just be a silly misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up...)
Last edited by infected slut princess on Tue Aug 06, 2013 5:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

> Oh, then you are an idiot. Because infected slut princess has never posted anything worth reading at any time.

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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Tue Aug 06, 2013 6:33 am

> isp wrote:Chamomile completely misunderstands -- if someone is coming to help you, a badge is not important.

In what possible world is every police action helpful to everyone? Your neighbor was murdered yesterday. You were seen fighting with him shortly before. The police will show up at your door. They will want to ask you questions about the fight. In no way are they there to help you. If you are innocent their presence will (ideally) be totally you-neutral. If you are guilty their presence will (ideally) be harmful. The police are at your door because a crime happened and you are legitimately suspicious, so there is no overstep here. The badge is the thing that lets you verify (not perfectly, but well enough) that the person knocking on the door is a police officer, instead of your neighbor's brother come to deliver vigilante justice based on his presumption of your guilt. Or a burglar with phenomenal timing. Or what the fuck ever.

> isp wrote:But if someone wants to use violence against you while enforcing unjust laws, a badge is supposedly what lets people do that. The guns the police have are ALWAYS relevant.

Firstly, no violence was used in this situation. No coercion was used in this situation. Every interaction the police had with anyone in this case was voluntary. We can't even have a discussion about enforcing unjust laws in this instance because no laws were enforced. There wasn't any force applied at any step.
Secondly, no. Authority and the force to assert that authority are the things that let people enforce laws, whether they are just or unjust. A badge is a visible symbol of invested authority and as such is empowering to civilians compared to the same invested authority without visible symbols where civilians just have to guess whether the man talking to them is a mugger playing pretend or an actual police officer. Now, you could go full anarchist and bitch that there are people who have authority invested in them at all and getting rid of badges is just part of getting rid of police and the state (and at that point you deserve to be laughed at). But so long as the state exists and invests agents with the authority to do its bidding, knowing who and who does not have that authority is strictly superior to the alternative.

> isp wrote:What is important is whether it's appropriate to send a gang of six armed state agents to someone's house for google searches.

You keep saying that, and it is explicitly not what happened. A company representative met with detectives about a recently fired employee who had been googling pressure cooker bombs. I have no idea what the timeframe on the googling is and I have no idea what Mr. Catalano was like in the work place. And neither do you. "Being fired" and "googling bombs" are not crimes, and as such no laws were brought to bear against any of the Catalano family (which you seem to keep forgetting). But it is suspicious, and the extent to which it is suspicious is going to be incredibly variable and subjective based on your opinion of Mr. Catalano. And in order to clear up that suspicion, police did the least invasive thing they could: showed up and asked him!

> isp wrote:Not to send six dudes with badges and guns (why not show up with one dude, or two dudes... why six? After all, it might just be a silly misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up...)

Well, as to the numbers, it might also "just" be someone who is planning to murder lots of people and as such is armed and dangerous. And having six people show up at your doorstep and not violate your rights is about the same as having one or two people show up and not violate your rights, in that your rights have not been violated either way.
The second part of that fucking baffles me. I genuinely do not understand. If the police asking (not compelling) Mr. Catalano to cooperate with them in an incredibly cursory and unintrusive search and questioning is unacceptable, in what possible way could this misunderstanding have been cleared up? No, really. What the fuck?
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Chamomile
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Post by Chamomile » Tue Aug 06, 2013 6:50 am

ISP's argument genuinely appears to be that after being informed that someone was potentially planning to murder dozens of innocent people, the police response should've been to wait until he actually does it to investigate, rather than any other course of action even if it's as uninvasive as just showing up at his house and asking him if he plans to murder anyone. Since condemning this level of investigation basically rules out all police activity past doughnut consumption, I assume ISP genuinely thinks that the police are always wrong whenever they do anything because they are the police, and when you suspect someone may be homicidally insane you as an untrained and poorly equipped civilian should investigate yourself. That, or nobody should do anything until dozens of civilians are killed in a madman's bombing, and then justice should be dispensed by a lynch mob.
I cannot find any other line of reasoning that manages to be more rational than this clustercuss of stupidity.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Tue Aug 06, 2013 9:38 am

Having had police come into my flat while brandishing guns and not displaying badges, I can tell you unequivocally that "badges and guns" is much better than "just guns". Having plain clothes police search your residence with guns in hand without identifying themselves as officers of the law is fucking terrifying.
Whining about police powers in the US just comes off as pathetic. Come over to Eastern Europe, I double dog dare you.
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Starmaker
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Post by Starmaker » Tue Aug 06, 2013 10:14 am

Last Sunday I've been assaulted, and another dude was actually attacked and injured, by three slaves indentured servants while passing through a market. The local cops were obviously in pay of the slaveowner, but it sure helped that they had badges.
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Maj
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Post by Maj » Tue Aug 06, 2013 7:20 pm

> DSMatticus wrote:And having six people show up at your doorstep and not violate your rights is about the same as having one or two people show up and not violate your rights, in that your rights have not been violated either way.

If they were conducting a search, having the additional people makes it go faster. It also makes sure that the cops are safe - if you do pose a threat, one or two officers can watch you while the search is being executed.
Last edited by Maj on Tue Aug 06, 2013 7:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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infected slut princess
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Post by infected slut princess » Tue Aug 06, 2013 11:25 pm

Suppose Chamomile gets fired or laid off from his job. He thinks swords are cool and when he was at work one time, he googled "swords."
Now suppose Chamomile's employer finds out about this very troubling google search. The employer also recognizes that Chamomile is an uptight dicklicker. The employer calls the cops because, according to Chamomile's logic provided to us earlier in this thread, this means Chamomile is potentially planning to murder dozens of people by hacking them with swords.
Six cops (not a thirty, not two, but six) show up at Chamomile's house and ask him "are you planning to murder people with swords?" This is certainly going to be effective because if he is planning to murder people with swords, he is definitely going to tell the cops about it right then and there.
Apparently to all you paranoid police-fappers, this situation gets a million points on the Awesome Scale.

> Oh, then you are an idiot. Because infected slut princess has never posted anything worth reading at any time.

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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Wed Aug 07, 2013 12:57 am

> isp wrote:investigating someone for googling swords is silly people don't go on mass murders with swords that's ridiculous and this has something to do with bombs because reasons [Disclaimer: heavily paraphrased]

Nope.

> isp wrote:Six cops (not a thirty, not two, but six) show up at Chamomile's house and ask him "are you planning to murder people with swords?" This is certainly going to be effective because if he is planning to murder people with swords, he is definitely going to tell the cops about it right then and there.

The potential to confirm a negative is valuable even without the potential to confirm a positive. If there is a test for some disease with two possible results {negative, inconclusive}, then that test cannot tell you you have the disease, but it might tell you you don't. And that is valuable information to have.
It's entirely possible that the police will show up and be turned away and have no further action to take (which is appropriate in the context of insufficient evidence). But it's also possible police will show up and be met with cooperation, and then when they find nothing everyone gets to stop worrying.
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Chamomile
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Post by Chamomile » Wed Aug 07, 2013 2:17 am

If six cops turn up at my door and make a polite request to search my house without removing anything so as to confirm that I do not, in fact, own a sword, they are free to do so. I genuinely do not care.
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