PhilipTheBucket @ PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

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It does occasionally happen that people get accused of a crime because they, in fact, committed a crime. Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Peter Navarro, Charles Manson, all those school shooters, the guy that broke into your car last year, drunk drivers, wife-beaters, a lot of people go through the court system because they in fact did do something wrong.

Without a system where a defense lawyer could argue vigorously to try to prove their innocence, no one who knowingly and deliberately got screwed for no good reason would have a chance to prove their innocence. Without someone on the other side trying to prove their guilt, it wouldn't work either. Again, I do think there are huge injustices built in to our current "justice" system, I actually completely agree with you on that. I just think that prosecutors doing their job isn't one of them.

I'm not sure. I can see it both ways. If you've ever worked in a place where a bunch of people in important roles quit, it fucks the place up usually in pretty significant ways.

Maybe the best of all the options is "stay on, agree to everything, but go full fascism-resistance-field-manual in trying to actively undermine everything that anyone tries to do." IDK if that goes into the newspapers when it happens though.

Well, the system is that they go hard after convictions, and there's a counterbalancing force on the other side that goes hard after acquittals. It's not really a wrong system, it is the best design we've come up with. There are horrible inequities in how it gets applied, but it's mostly a matter of (1) laws getting made in a way that perverts justice on behalf of the rich (2) the prosecution getting the full resources it needs to go hard in 100% of cases, and the defense only getting those resources if the client is wealthy and otherwise "lol good luck sucker."

I don't think you can blame the prosecutors for doing their jobs (assuming they're not breaking the rules in how they do it) under that system.

this isn’t a crime that would have been prevented by the gun control measures advocated by the Democrats, since none of the proposals involve disarming the police

Just had to get that in there, you fucking donkeys.

I saw some of these guys at the protest on Saturday. Someone had a microphone and spent, no lie, about 2/3rds of the time they had the mic aiming vicious criticism at the Democrats. Not "both sides," not the whole system (that was the remaining 1/3rd), but the Democrats specifically. I thought about making a bigger post about it but I'm not even sure what to say about it. I think there was 0 criticism at all leveled at the Trump administration or anything that they were doing.

Great job guys

There is a whole genre of smuggling that is literally just buying a bunch of watches or couple of high-end laptops or something and then throwing them in your suitcase and doing exactly this.

If you’re doing it with single items for personal use is it fine? Probably so, as long as you can avoid being extra stupid about it. Is it a good thing to get in the habit of? Oh mercy no.

Wait: My memory of the story was that Clinton loved to escort women around and constantly signed up for the duty, and everyone else on all sides of the equation had no particular strong feelings about it. Except for John Mulaney’s mom.

Yeah, makes perfect sense, will do.

Matt Taibbi (before he went crazy) wrote some hilarious bits about sneaking all kinds of stuff into his articles when he was writing for smaller papers, and he said no one ever noticed. I was very saddened when he went over to the darkness for reasons I still don't understand.

Yeah, makes sense. I just took it out from this post, want me to go back and do the same for earlier posts?

Sure, will do. I generally don't like dodging around paywalls but The Atlantic for whatever weird reason puts full text of their stories into their RSS feed, so my habit was just to duplicate the story from the RSS feed.

Given your response to ranandtoldthat below though I suspect we don’t really disagree much on the Atlantic’s not-so-great reporting on the topic, though.

Yeah, no disagreement at all. I had no idea until this post how bad their stance on Gaza / Israel was, which definitely makes me look at this article in a new light.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas had dissented, and that Alito was planning to write a response.

I really hope when this is all over we can put these guys on trial. Impeachment is not enough.

Rashida Tlaib is better on Israel than Shapiro, yes. Go figure. She was not an option for vice president.

The article notes that Tim Walz was the main alternative option being pushed by the anti-Shapiro crowd, and he was objectively worse on Israel in terms of messaging at least.

I do get what you mean. I read the Wikipedia article and watched an interview where he talked about Israel, and I definitely didn't like him. All his answers are politician answers, very successfully crafted so that it'll sound to everyone on any side of the issue that he agrees with them. He did say clearly that he prefers a two-state solution but that was about the only non-weaselly thing he said. But yeah, he has a bunch of extremely anti-Palestinian actions and I can definitely see why a committed pro-Palestine person could have a serious problem with him.

“We didn’t mean to send you that stupid letter, it was so so stupid, you should have known it was stupid when we sent it to you.”

• “That sounds like a you problem”
• “So if we’d agreed you would have said never mind don’t worry about it forget all that?”
• “Apology accepted. Contact us if you need anything else”

I feel like this is the kind of question that needs a whole lot of details before it is answerable.

Tax fraud? Absolutely fuck not.

Drunk driving? Probably I would give them a single "Hey next time I find out you're doing that I am calling the cops on you" warning shot.

Stealing from their company? Depends, what does the company do and who owns it? Again almost certainly not.

And so on.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, nominated by President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, wrote that he and his two colleagues “cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos.”

Until I read this whole verdict, I hadn't realized why people were making a big deal about it. It's breathtaking.

The basic differences between the branches mandate a serious effort at mutual respect. The respect that courts must accord the Executive must be reciprocated by the Executive’s respect for the courts. Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the Executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate.

This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dint of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions.

The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.

It is, as we have noted, all too possible to see in this case an incipient crisis, but it may present an opportunity as well. We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos.

This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.

The person who wrote that should get a medal made of gold.

Full text is in this post.

I feel like you actually probably can drive air into the empty spaces (that's exactly how your lungs work), if you can somehow make a tight enough seal on the person's nipple, but it would be incredibly dangerous because of embolism. Don't do it.

Holy shit, you’re not kidding. I generally like The Atlantic for obvious recent reasons but I just looked up their Gaza coverage and about 50% of it is more or less “Why is everyone mad at Israel what have they ever done to anyone” 😳

Lemmy’s core development team are communists, of a very bizarre and inconsistent type that is openly or semi-openly in favor of massive command-economy-capitalist countries like China and Russia even when they are engaged in imperialist conduct. They’re weird. Idk what’s up with it. A lot of the core historical instances still have that mindset and are sometimes so obnoxious about demanding that everyone else needs to also that they are banned from the more recent more mainstream-thinking instances.

Generalizations are tough but I think it’s safe to say that 90% of everyone else on Lemmy is some variety of vague-leftist roughly in the mold of Bernie Sanders, which depending on your personal Overton window you may define anywhere from “disgusting liberal who betrayed the movement by voting for Kamala Harris” to “Communist.”

Hope this helps