Mnemnosyne @ Mnemnosyne @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

We could start with holding police officers responsible. It's great that they charged this one, but why aren't the other police there being charged as accomplices since they took no action to prevent the shooting?

So here's a few simple starter thoughts.

1. Establish an external agency with the mandate of prosecuting police. They have their own prosecutorial system, their own investigators, their own prosecutors, their own courts and their own judges, completely unconnected to the prosecutorial system the police work with. You cannot have the same people that work together one day and rely on each other be the ones to investigate each other, it doesn't work. Not even a separate 'internal affairs division' is enough.
2. Any police officer who discharges their weapon, for any reason, is immediately suspended, and any pay is withheld until an investigation for why the weapon was discharged is completed. The investigation of course is conducted by that external agency.
3. If a police officer discharging a weapon causes injury or death, all police officers on the scene are suspended and their pay withheld until the investigation is over.
4. If the police officer who discharged their weapon is charged with assault, murder, whatever, then all other officers at the scene are charged as accomplices, unless they took proactive action to prevent the first officer from committing their illegal action. Think of it like felony murder - if you and a group of friends are committing a crime and someone is murdered, you are all prosecutable under felony murder even if you had no direct hand in the murder at all.

That's probably a good start, it may not solve all the problems, but it'd be a lot better than what's being done now, which is very, very little. I'd say an even better thing to do in addition would be to have every current police officer purged and never work in law enforcement again. All police organizations kinda need a clean slate with fresh people and no organizational momentum and culture carryover from how it's happening now, because a lot of what needs to change is organizational culture, and just altering the rules is more difficult than rebuilding a completely new organizational culture from the ground up.

Better to acknowledge it in a response. I prefer to do that myself if I'm wrong or something of that nature, post a reply acknowledging instead of trying to cover up that I was ever wrong in the first place.

That would be hilarious if someone prepared a bunch of little clips of things Hitler said that Trump also says very similar things to, and then anytime he says one, just respond by playing a clip of Hitler saying basically the same thing, and giving a 'Do I need to say more?' look.

They aren't using it, no, but that doesn't mean the scientific method can't study what they do and come to an understanding of it - probably a better understanding of it than they have, since as you say, they aren't using it. It'd just take a few decades of study probably to have a much stronger understanding of how it works.

My point is just that people draw this weird line between 'science' and 'magic' as though they were incompatible. In a world in which magic is real and useful, science can study it.

It irritates me that so many forums and media sites allow you to edit your posts at will. There's one site I go to that I like very much - it has a 5 minute edit window, and after that, your post can no longer be edited. You can't change what you said, pretend you never said things, etc, once you say something it remains. It would be nice if more sites were like that. Or at least, if you edit/delete something, for there to be an option to check the history to see what it used to be, so if you try to delete some comment you made people can still check it. Whether it's informational, or it's because you're trying to hide something you said that you realize was actually super shitty and people are getting angry at you for it, I prefer things to stick.

No. They're not. If they were, they'd be stopping this themselves. This guy shot her. What about the other officers that were there? At least one other is mentioned in the article. Why didn't they immediately draw on him and stop him from attacking this woman?

Every time we hear about one of these bad cops, there's other cops just standing around doing nothing at best, and helping at worst.

No 'good people' are cops. If they were good people when they went in, they either get fired, get mysteriously dead on the job, or stop being good. There are no other options.

Their reality doesn't defy understanding by the scientific process. It has reliable, repeatable results, and therefore can be studied and empirically catalogued. The only way something could not be studied by science is if it's totally random, if actions do not correlate, even slightly, with results. Of course, such behavior would make it completely useless as a tool, because one could never get desired results from it. Magic in the setting is very reliable and repatable, and as long as you do it right, results can be studied, so it's easily catalogued by the scientific method.

This is why PS3 is the last PlayStation that I owned, and I didn't even buy it retail.

After they discontinued the backwards compatible model I sought out and bought one secondhand, and swore never again to buy a PlayStation product unless they release one on which I can play all my PlayStation games all the way back to 1.

Eh, the constitution is already ignored on this point plenty, since there's lots of 'arms' that have been restricted. Why not ignore it some more?

These convictions were for state level crimes that happened before he was president. So completely outside the scope of the official act thing.

That decision is probably going to be used to get him completely out of the classified documents case though, not that he really needed the extra help since that one was already being presided over by a crony judge he appointed.

Yeah, I mean, Trump already got convicted of felonies and then nothing happened. Did he even pay a fine or something for that? I heard about the conviction and then.... absolutely nothing.

Yeah, Trump is a stupid target and this is bad timing. Now if someone had gone after the Supreme Court a year or three ago, that would've been a good thing. Even now it might still be. But Trump? Terrible choice of targets. He's...his relevance has already happened. It's too late for his death to be positive in any significant way.

Hell, I suspect that it might boost the Republican candidate, whoever is selected to replace him, unless they wind up having a really nasty fight where various supporters get extremely entrenched against each other. But that's not likely - Republicans are very tribalist, once they select a candidate, most of them are going to support him, regardless of how badly they were speaking of him five minutes ago when they were in full support of his opponent.

Despite Musk, Teslas did have some positive effect as they helped push electric car adoption. The big automakers were not interested in taking risks, and nobody was eager to build out large charger networks.

I certainly don't credit Musk himself for it, but no one should feel ashamed of having bought one of those cars back then. Today there are other good options for electric vehicles from companies run by slightly less bad people, but let's not kid ourselves. Everything we buy comes from some company that is enriching monsters...it's just that some of them are more monstrous than others.

I do not believe in 'undecided' voters. I don't think they exist.

So this is not going to be decided by then. This is going to be decided very simply: will enough people in the right states bother to vote?

If we managed to get through a Trump term, with him being actively malicious and looking to do as much damage as possible, it proves exactly the fucking opposite.

Good intentions and a willingness to listen to knowledgeable advisors (but not simply follow them, genuinely listening to their explanations and then making a decision) is enough to be a good president.

Qualifications, like with most jobs that require all sorts of degrees and high requirements, are bullshit.

Better to try to get them not to vote at all I think. Push that and it might convince them to go vote when they might possibly have been willing not to. And other offices are also very important.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Not 'to grant them greater control' or even ownership. To secure exclusive right for a limited time. And this only because it was meant to promote science and art.

Using copyright to prevent a work from spreading is a direct perversion of the intent, it is using it in a manner diametrically opposed to what it is supposed to do.

I'd go the other way, adhering very strictly to the letter of the law without the tiniest bit of wiggle room or interpretation of anything as nebulous as the 'spirit' of the law.

Trouble being that natural languages that people use to converse are ill suited for that level of precision and detail. I've thought that perhaps a constructed language, something between a language and programming code may be a better way to write laws.

While breaking off diplomatic relations is an extreme step I wouldn't recommend, I do wonder if it might not be practical to severely limit the number of diplomatic immunity eligible people allowed in after something like this.

Tell China that henceforth they get to send no more than three or maybe five people to whom it applies. Still gives it to the ambassador and a very small staff, but removes the feasibility of sending in teams of spies and kidnappers thus protected.

These changes could be applied retroactively; this isn't like creating an ex post facto law and then jailing people for breaking a law that didn't exist at the time of the event.