Legal experts: NY AG “set up” Don Jr. on witness stand — and now he could be criminally prosecuted
skweetis @ skweetis @kbin.social Posts 0Comments 34Joined 2 yr. ago
I saw video of her being interviewed on stage at a conference and she seems just as weird and psychologically unhealthy as Musk. Smug and condescending while narcissistically unable to acknowledge unpleasant realities that every single person knows are true. I think I'm mostly talking about style here. All big CEO-types would lay off thousands of good humans who are hard workers in a heartbeat to make their rich investors more money, but some manage to do it without the delivery of a shitposting bond villain. Watching her answer questions for 5 minutes made my skin crawl.
I don't know, man. The comment that is getting downvoted proposes a narrative where people steal things from Target and then Target has no choice but to move out of the poor neighborhood to open up stores in a nice neighborhood, and therefore the people stealing are responsible for that harm to their communities. I'm downvoting that because it's wrong in like a thousand ways, some evidence for which is illustrated by the quote and article I linked to.
My bad on the "lemming" thing. I'm reading this on kbin so that's not in my vernacular, and the patronizing "tiny worldview" insult had me reading your comment in a certain tone.
I just happened to be in that Ballard target for the first time last week to get my Covid booster and it was weird. Besides the pharmacy, there were basically no employees. No cashiers, one person who ushered you over to the self-checkout, and two greeters (aka loss prevention). It's just anecdotal observation, but there was no visible sign of, you know, crime problem, i.e. nobody camped out on the sidewalk. But there were also zero customers. That store is tiny for a Target and seemed to have basically the same amount of inventory as a Bartells. For example, we bought a laundry basket while we were there and they just had one style and color (ugly as fuck!). And there is a CVS and a Walgreens basically a block away. And the Target has paid parking. So, I feel pretty confident that this Target was a loser due to bad business decisions.
The article this thread is about is talking about Target losing 2% of their $27 billion annual PROFIT (as in the money the shareholders keep after they pay their employees) to theft. And here you are blaming poor people for the state of their communities.
"The fantastic journalists at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did an analysis and found that this single video spawned 309 separate articles about the Walgreens incident in the 28 days after it was posted. The researchers found that there was not a single article about a multi-million dollar wage theft settlement paid out by Walgreens to its California employees. (On January 5, 2023, after I wrote this essay, a Walgreens executive admitted publicly that the company had overblown their claims about retail theft.)"
https://equalityalec.substack.com/p/the-volume-of-news
You are the lemming, buddy.
What the actual fuck?! When I read this story a month ago I was furious because they claimed he was out of the car and lunging at them with a knife when they shot him through a closed car window. Mistaking someone for being out of the car and lunging at you when they are inside the car with the window rolled up is not the same as (claiming to) think a knife is a gun. So, you get to lie about what you were scared about and then revise your lie to something more plausible later on? So much fucking bullshit.
Also, it should be noted that the police only "walked back" the statement about him being out of the car when the family went door to door and found ring cam footage that he was in the car. And they had to do this because the police wouldn't share body camera footage with the family.
Why would the cops get to decide how quickly people have to leave the stadium? Do you think there is a law that the stadium must be empty exactly 23 minutes after the game? Do you think the cops are experts that were trained on the amount of time that people can safely linger in a stadium after a game? The cops wanted to go home so they abused their authority and then violently assaulted a school band director in front of a bunch of kids.
It's a record of birth that you use to verify your identity. Gender doesn't need to be on there at all - "Oh, it says on this birth certificate that you're a boy, so I guess we know for sure that you are indeed Steve Smith!" But if it's on there, it should match the gender that the adult identifies/presents as. There's no reason the DMV needs to know what your genitals were (or, really, what the doctor thought your genitals looked like) when you were born. Imagine any other private information about your physical body being a public record - "We'll start processing your home loan now, Mr. Smith, sorry that you were born without nipples. That's gotta be rough!" It's stupid. And, of course, it's also cruel. But you seem pretty unbothered by that part.
I don't care who fucks who UNLESS you are trying to make it illegal to have a book that just mentions that gay people exist in a public library. Then who you fuck becomes relevant. And I still don't care who you fuck, but I am only interested in the limited strategic political value it has to embarrass these shitheads. And, yes, conservatives do not care about hypocrisy, but I still think it's good to publicize this kind of thing in case it just subliminally diminishes some of their supporters' enthusiasm, even though it they won't ever actually withdraw their support.
What made you previously decide not to buy it?
Capitalism is the problem because it incentivizes these behaviors and allows "capital" (i.e. rich people) to control the political process. The people who are pushing the anti-trans agenda - just like the gay marriage scare of the past - are doing so to manipulate people into voting against their own interests to elect politicians who are loudly subservient to capital. It's not a coincidence that the same people, i.e. Republicans, have been pushing for trickle-down economics and privatizing social security for decades. Democrats aren't much better. In some part because Citizens United (a Republican gift to the rich) declared that money = speech, and so it's hard to compete electorally without caving in to the demands of capital. So, they do dumb shit like propose privatizing the water supply:
And this doesn't even get into the real nasty part of capitalism which is the plunder and exploitation of the global south that has gone on for centuries to build today's capitalist society.
If you have actions you plan to take that will get your elected representatives to stop doing things that makes the ultrawealthy richer and start doing things that improve the lives of everyone else (UBI, universal healthcare, equality for all) under the capitalist system we have, then go ahead and get on it. People pointing out the flaws in capitalism is not the reason you have thus far been unsuccessful. And when you call for everyone to stop criticizing capitalism, as if it is some universal equilibrium that is undeniably correct, you are carrying water for the very people you want to oppose.
Maybe therapy could help you answer that question.
You think that you're saying something clever, but you're not. The suffixes "philic" and "phobic" are used in scientific contexts to denote when things are attracted or repelled. Yes, colloquially people use "phobic" to mean fear, but it doesn't always mean that in science. For example, when scientists talk about https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/PhysicalandTheoreticalChemistryTextbookMaps/SupplementalModules(PhysicalandTheoreticalChemistry)/PhysicalPropertiesofMatter/AtomicandMolecularProperties/IntermolecularForces/HydrophobicInteractions they aren't saying that the molecules are literally "afraid" of water. They aren't wrong in their language. You are. Homophobic people are repelled by gay people, and so "homophobia" is exactly the correct term.
And, in addition to that, I gather from your replies that you are a straight person. If you consider yourself an ally, or just not a shitty person, then please refrain from reducing a homophobic murder to a semantic game. It's real life for gay people, not a thought experiment for you to exercise your contrarian rhetorical skills. You are not helping.
Editing to add: And, of course, people DO claim fear of gay people as a defense for murdering gay people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaypanicdefense
"A defendant may allege to have found the same-sex sexual advances so offensive or frightening that they were provoked into reacting, were acting in self-defense, were of diminished capacity, or were temporarily insane, and that this circumstance is exculpatory or mitigating."
So, even if you're junvenile semantic games were valid (they aren't), you're wrong. So, again, please take a seat.
This is one example of how the current criminal justice system prioritizes capitalism over public safety. People who live paycheck to paycheck don't have resources to remove themselves from situations where they know they are in danger. Most people are murdered by people they know, not strangers. This is especially true in terms of women's pay inequality, where this systemic failure makes it harder for women to separate themselves from abusive partners, who often end up killing them. If you want to reduce murders, you need some wealth distribution, not more policing.
No, this is not cool. Louis C.K. and South Park were wrong, actually. There are a couple of things wrong with it.
If you're yelling fag at a straight person, nobody thinks you're yelling "Hey straight guy, you literally have sex with men!" because that wouldn't make any sense. What you're yelling is "You are something bad. You know, like gay people are bad." That's why you never hear anyone say, "Hey you cut me off, supermodel!" or "You spilled your drink on me, fireman!" because it's not a random word after that comma, it's an insult. So, yelling fag at people who aren't (necessarily) gay is of course not being homophobic...to the straight person you're yelling at. It's being homophobic to the gay people who may or may not have heard it.
Second, the whole premise that you can use slurs and it is up to the target of the slur to figure out if you mean it in the hateful way or the "fun" way is dumb. That's not how the world works. You can't go up to a guy in a bar and say, "Your girlfriend is ugly and your mom's a slut" and then get mad when they take it as an insult. It is not other people's job to look into your soul and realize that when you're saying something insulting that you don't mean it that way. I'm sure you think "it's just words", but you probably don't know what it's like to be on a public bus and hear murmuring of "faggot" from the seat behind you. Maybe you're a tough guy and wouldn't have worried about it, but I had a long thought about what my plan would be if this guy attacked me for being gay. He didn't, but that fear was still real.
If it makes you feel any better, this is not something that only straight people have to abide by. There's a great Dead Milkmen song called "Instant Club Hit" that I love. It's a funny song from the 80s that makes fun of goth culture, but there's a part where it says "art fag" over and over again. Now I know those guys are cool. When I saw them live in Portland they asked people to donate to a group called Safe Pride PDX. One of the members is gay. Anyway, I scolded my husband once for putting that song on the jukebox at a bar. Not because I think the song is really homophobic, but because some gay guy who doesn't know this band could be in the bar and all of sudden realize "Oh fuck, the song playing in this bar is saying fag over and over again!" and get nervous that they aren't safe. So we don't play that song on the jukebox anymore. And you can think of another thing to yell at people who cut you off in traffic.
Wait until you find out that they give children with cancer literal poison. It's called chemotherapy. Let me know if you would like me to decide if your child can consent to chemotherapy. I'll be happy to step in and make that decision for you.
I don't know anything about the legal details - besides what I've read on the internet, aka RESEARCH - but I unfortunately watched the clip of Junior getting interviewed about his knowledge of GAAP and, in my opinion, the prosecutor laughed and played along with his "jokes" and he of course loved the positive attention and let his guard down. To some degree that seemed like a pretty good "set-up", but just like everything else, in a totally legal and normal to court proceedings way.