Blue suicide, or suicide by cop was considered bad form in the aughts given that it means leaving it up to an innocent officer to do the dirty work.
Nowadays police seem to be desperately eager to notch their belts with kills like a WWII bombardier. Was it always this way, and the don't-stress-a-cop stuff was all pro-police propaganda?
Although most of the victims of the DHS who were abducted without due process were typically released after a few hours, their phones were confiscated and kept, and lawyers are to this day trying to get them back.
So when the FBI holds up phones they allegedly need to get into, what I see (until demonstrated otherwise) are the confiscated devices of innocent Americans whose property continues to be held by a government agency that has no established cause or need to search these phones.
What trustworthy institution do we have to review these phones and their possession by the federal government and their rightful owners? Until this, and every part of the DHS and national security sector can actually demonstrate it serves a public serving purpose, I hope it not only goes dark for them, but it all falls into a singularity they can never reach.
But that isn't their job. SCOTUS rulings aside, Comey changed the mission of the FBI from law enforcement to national security. Though like the rest of law enforcement in the US it seems to have taken on mass confiscation since that is more profitable than actually trying to serve a public purpose.
Corey Doctorow struggles sometimes to put up content.
Every once in a while, a person I respect finds his own content is ghosted by Twitter or a media service so only subscribers get to see it. When it's someone like Doctorow who double checks on other accounts or non-accounts to see if he can see his work, these events get outed.
And it makes me paranoid as fuck.
Right now, anti-Capitalists are noticing some of their tweets and posts are getting ghosted or silenced. More generally, all my information coming from the Gaza Strip are from less-than-official sources (but man, video of soldiers brutalizing children is worth a dumpster-fire's worth of words).
So of fucking course the MAGAs and Qs are going to capitalize on this trend that valid content is being suppressed to imply that because their own content is being suppressed, it must also be valid.
This is a problem when the ones doing the suppressing aren't the good guys doing consistently according to rational rules.
Perhaps it's just a moderation problem, but Doctorow seems to get moderated a conspicuous lot.
Work the magic to put the thing in the other thing
Now that the GOP is operating entirely on the notion that double standards should apply so that the Republican party and MAGAs should get what they want all the time and everyone else should be denied, it's possible they're losing the ability to appeal to the notion of egalitarian law. They want MAGA-approved hits to lead on a Google search but are struggling to work out how that would be done.
So they shot in the dark and created what in Star Trek parlance is tech talk that should wow the audience that the ship's engineers are doing something complicated to fix the negative space wedgie.
Except its lawyer talk and any judge with conscience or integrity left is going to realize that's not how c̶o̶m̶m̶o̶n̶ c̶a̶r̶r̶i̶e̶r̶ l̶a̶w̶s̶ transporters operate. They only can hope the judge is also MAGA and will see his way to do the MAGA thing. <Winkity-nudge 𝕿𝖚𝖇𝖆𝖑𝖈𝖆𝖎𝖓>
That's what US Secretary of State Tillerson called Trump in a moment of candor. We can't be sure that was the last straw that motivated Tillerson's ouster. Rumor has it Tillerson had written his resignation already and Pence convinced him to hold out a bit longer.
I suspect fucking moron is a prerequisite to work for Trump, To be a MAGA or a Q... or a Proud Boy. FBI plants must me losing their goddamn minds saturated in and forced to mimic the banality.
But I get the implication and appreciate it. As a youngster, I too yearned for a cause in which the bad guys wore black hats and the good guys wore white. I, too yearned for a cause greater than myself. But then I had to face the horrifying revelation that sides are what we take in hours of desperation and scarcity. And the ones painted to be the culprits is not the ones on the propaganda posters.
Besides which, everything Trump stands for, everything his MAGAs and Qs and goon squads stand for is contrary to the promise of the United States. And contrary to societal fundamentals I would argue are essential in a modern nation. So no thank you. I'm glad you didn't ask outright.
Hence the need for an extended search to find some reason to arrest him.
Law enforcement in the US is notorious for finding petty reasons to put people in prison. But their primary interest is in finding and seizing large amounts of cash or liquidatable assets they can seize to purchase secret surveillance equipment.
Also to imprison nonwhites, and anyone else who is too weird for the streets (e.g. lunatics and trans-folk).
The problem is the police want trick pony dogs that signal at anything, which justifies searching according to a signal.
If we use dogs to detect substances by walking them along hundreds of passengers' luggage, because we can't afford to open and search every one, that's proper use.
But when a police officer brings his dog to force a detained driver to open up his car without consent to search, that's improper. And we see a lot of that in the US.
Dogs that false positive should be retired, and (noting an instance) when the Cook County law enforcement search Latin folk with dogs, they yield over 90% false positives. That's misuse of dogs.
I'd like to suggest policy about limiting dog use, but I've lost trust with US law enforcement entirely, and think the whole justice system should be abolished.
So I'll say dogs should not be used in law enforcement in the United States. There's just too much risk of abuse.
Wait, so you're saying that it's plausible Senator Hawley, Attorney General Paxton and the Federalist society plausibly believe and plausibly could admit a violent coup as per the January 6th riot at the US Capitol represents an appropriate alternative remedy?
I mean I believe they believe it so long as it's to install a government they are personally aligned with, but I find it absurd they'd say so out loud.
If the satirical nature of the invite is not obvious then the deterioration of democracy in the US should be cause for alarm.
Of course, this should be no surprise, considering the open calls to violence by Representatives Gaetz and Greene and Lieutenant General Flynn which have been said in public without any accountability or consequence.
Don't these tests now have a long and checkered history?
I'd think a defense lawyer could spend a day reading to the judge, prosecution and jury news article after news article after news article after news article of these tests yielding false positives, sometimes resulting in a false conviction and sending an innocent person to prison.
Or is this the end result of tough on crime policies, because Americans just want more warm bodies occupying our private penitentiaries?
Trump, advised by his handlers, added context to obfuscate what was clearly an endorsement of white supremacist groups endorsing replacement theory one of whom launched a lethal attack on counter-protestors, killing one.
Trump was covering his ass while at the same time resenting he had to cover his ass. Now, enough of the GOP is afraid of him (and the rest of us see his dog tubas) that he doesn't bother.
Trump is very much the monster we knew he was in 2015 and 2016. He made it clear what it was. That just happened to appeal to a lot of people: Create a mythical past where the overclass held power that was allegedly better than today, and administrate to return to that era, as if it were true, even if it means treating the underclass as subhuman.
Fascism.
Even the idiots who didn't get it was a con by a liar got that Trump was the obliterate-the-nonwhites president. And today, that's all the GOP is.
If the Democrats didn’t stand in the way of closing travel from China and the boarder stayed remain in Mexico; it’s likely it would have remained rather low numbers.
Am I reading this right? You believe that closing the borders after we already knew COVID-19 was in the general population was somehow going to help keep the numbers low?
I'd say you are either delusional or terrible at math, but I bet this is a thing like young-earth creationists who espouse falsehood under orders.
Your arguments may be pragmatic bad faith, but they're bad faith nonetheless, and it's an act of hostility just to make them. You're trolling.
Our western societies don't like it when women utilize their own sexuality to augment their market (contrast when a corporation uses young sexualized teens to sell clothes or cars). I'd say it was a US thing, but it notoriously happened in the endgame Soviet Union and Mafya-run Russia in the 90s. (Young women selling themselves curiously correlates with failing economies)
We don't mind porn. We mind when women benefit from porn. We don't mind using sex to sell so long as it's clear the body in question is an employee of a larger entity.
In the podcast You're Wrong About Michael Hobbes tells the story of The Chicks (the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks) and their rise to fame before getting cancelled(-ish) by the right-wing anti-fandom media talk engine.
One of the smaller bits is about their early albums before the incident. But Dan Rather notes that Sony made about $150 million from the sales and so the artists themselves should have gotten about $50 million of that, right?
Less than one million. IIRC about $500,000. It lead to a big lawsuit and was the beginning of the end of the Chicks as a country band for daring to rock the boat. Hobbes goes into some detail about how Hollywood Accounting is much like hospital billing, in which expenses charges are overinflated to deplete artist royalties.
Copyright as it is today is giant rent-seeking scams, and piracy is minimally unethical by comparison, and the story of the Chicks is one out of hundreds (if not thousands).
Regardless, it's the most recent ep as of today, found here. Definitely worth the hour-ish listen.
Yeah, this smacks of the whole CIA torture program, and of the UK Prime Minister sending goons to collect and smash some hard drives belonging to a news agency: Some aristocrats in government are angry due to recent events, and since some sense of justice (whether deserved or not) isn't forth coming, they want to hurt someone and so grab the nearest stranger that looks appropriate, whether Arab-looking Americans, or news agencies or bottom-rung employees of an internet service.
Since the internet services in question are huge and already notoriously don't care much about their bottom-rung employees, it doesn't take much thought to realize this won't actually do anything to large businesses (but will hurt smaller ones who can't usually move their VIPs offshore anyway).
It does illustrate how ours is still a world of plutocrats and peons, in which the former group still have folks in the latter group whipped for their enjoyment.
On the post: Judge Don Willett Calls Out Appeals Court For Saying Setting A Suicidal Man On Fire Didn't Violate His Rights
Something I remember as easily as the aughts.
Blue suicide, or suicide by cop was considered bad form in the aughts given that it means leaving it up to an innocent officer to do the dirty work.
Nowadays police seem to be desperately eager to notch their belts with kills like a WWII bombardier. Was it always this way, and the don't-stress-a-cop stuff was all pro-police propaganda?
On the post: FBI Director Ignores More Than 500 Ongoing Capitol Raid Prosecutions To Complain That Encryption Is Keeping Criminals From Being Caught
I'm reminded of the Portland abductions by LGM
Although most of the victims of the DHS who were abducted without due process were typically released after a few hours, their phones were confiscated and kept, and lawyers are to this day trying to get them back.
So when the FBI holds up phones they allegedly need to get into, what I see (until demonstrated otherwise) are the confiscated devices of innocent Americans whose property continues to be held by a government agency that has no established cause or need to search these phones.
What trustworthy institution do we have to review these phones and their possession by the federal government and their rightful owners? Until this, and every part of the DHS and national security sector can actually demonstrate it serves a public serving purpose, I hope it not only goes dark for them, but it all falls into a singularity they can never reach.
I have not one cause to have respect for the FBI.
On the post: FBI Director Ignores More Than 500 Ongoing Capitol Raid Prosecutions To Complain That Encryption Is Keeping Criminals From Being Caught
"To Serve and Protect"
But that isn't their job. SCOTUS rulings aside, Comey changed the mission of the FBI from law enforcement to national security. Though like the rest of law enforcement in the US it seems to have taken on mass confiscation since that is more profitable than actually trying to serve a public purpose.
On the post: Does Taking Down Content Lead Ignorant People To Believe It's More Likely To Be True?
Corey Doctorow struggles sometimes to put up content.
Every once in a while, a person I respect finds his own content is ghosted by Twitter or a media service so only subscribers get to see it. When it's someone like Doctorow who double checks on other accounts or non-accounts to see if he can see his work, these events get outed.
And it makes me paranoid as fuck.
Right now, anti-Capitalists are noticing some of their tweets and posts are getting ghosted or silenced. More generally, all my information coming from the Gaza Strip are from less-than-official sources (but man, video of soldiers brutalizing children is worth a dumpster-fire's worth of words).
So of fucking course the MAGAs and Qs are going to capitalize on this trend that valid content is being suppressed to imply that because their own content is being suppressed, it must also be valid.
This is a problem when the ones doing the suppressing aren't the good guys doing consistently according to rational rules.
Perhaps it's just a moderation problem, but Doctorow seems to get moderated a conspicuous lot.
On the post: FBI Ignores Internal Guidelines To Target Readers Of Reporting On The Shooting Of FBI Agents (Updated)
So Pro-tip
Anonymize the hell out of your connection before connecting to fbi.gov websites.
Pro'lly a good idea re: dhs.gov
NSA Haiku generator is working again.
On the post: Ohio Files Bizarre And Nonsensical Lawsuit Against Google, Claiming It's A Common Carrier; But What Does That Even Mean?
Work the magic to put the thing in the other thing
Now that the GOP is operating entirely on the notion that double standards should apply so that the Republican party and MAGAs should get what they want all the time and everyone else should be denied, it's possible they're losing the ability to appeal to the notion of egalitarian law. They want MAGA-approved hits to lead on a Google search but are struggling to work out how that would be done.
So they shot in the dark and created what in Star Trek parlance is tech talk that should wow the audience that the ship's engineers are doing something complicated to fix the negative space wedgie.
Except its lawyer talk and any judge with conscience or integrity left is going to realize that's not how c̶o̶m̶m̶o̶n̶ c̶a̶r̶r̶i̶e̶r̶ l̶a̶w̶s̶ transporters operate. They only can hope the judge is also MAGA and will see his way to do the MAGA thing. <Winkity-nudge 𝕿𝖚𝖇𝖆𝖑𝖈𝖆𝖎𝖓>
On the post: As Predicted: Parler Is Banning Users It Doesn't Like
Fucking morons
That's what US Secretary of State Tillerson called Trump in a moment of candor. We can't be sure that was the last straw that motivated Tillerson's ouster. Rumor has it Tillerson had written his resignation already and Pence convinced him to hold out a bit longer.
I suspect fucking moron is a prerequisite to work for Trump, To be a MAGA or a Q... or a Proud Boy. FBI plants must me losing their goddamn minds saturated in and forced to mimic the banality.
But I get the implication and appreciate it. As a youngster, I too yearned for a cause in which the bad guys wore black hats and the good guys wore white. I, too yearned for a cause greater than myself. But then I had to face the horrifying revelation that sides are what we take in hours of desperation and scarcity. And the ones painted to be the culprits is not the ones on the propaganda posters.
Besides which, everything Trump stands for, everything his MAGAs and Qs and goon squads stand for is contrary to the promise of the United States. And contrary to societal fundamentals I would argue are essential in a modern nation. So no thank you. I'm glad you didn't ask outright.
On the post: Stanford Federalist Society Tries To 'Cancel' Law Student For Satirical Email About Josh Hawley
Sarcasm
Nothing goes over my head! My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it.
On the post: Man Sues After Field Drug Test Says His Daughter's Ashes Are Meth And Ecstasy
Legal weed in his car
Hence the need for an extended search to find some reason to arrest him.
Law enforcement in the US is notorious for finding petty reasons to put people in prison. But their primary interest is in finding and seizing large amounts of cash or liquidatable assets they can seize to purchase secret surveillance equipment.
Also to imprison nonwhites, and anyone else who is too weird for the streets (e.g. lunatics and trans-folk).
On the post: Man Sues After Field Drug Test Says His Daughter's Ashes Are Meth And Ecstasy
Trick Pony Dogs
The problem is the police want trick pony dogs that signal at anything, which justifies searching according to a signal.
If we use dogs to detect substances by walking them along hundreds of passengers' luggage, because we can't afford to open and search every one, that's proper use.
But when a police officer brings his dog to force a detained driver to open up his car without consent to search, that's improper. And we see a lot of that in the US.
Dogs that false positive should be retired, and (noting an instance) when the Cook County law enforcement search Latin folk with dogs, they yield over 90% false positives. That's misuse of dogs.
I'd like to suggest policy about limiting dog use, but I've lost trust with US law enforcement entirely, and think the whole justice system should be abolished.
So I'll say dogs should not be used in law enforcement in the United States. There's just too much risk of abuse.
On the post: Stanford Federalist Society Tries To 'Cancel' Law Student For Satirical Email About Josh Hawley
Missing exaggeration beyond plausibility
Wait, so you're saying that it's plausible Senator Hawley, Attorney General Paxton and the Federalist society plausibly believe and plausibly could admit a violent coup as per the January 6th riot at the US Capitol represents an appropriate alternative remedy?
I mean I believe they believe it so long as it's to install a government they are personally aligned with, but I find it absurd they'd say so out loud.
If the satirical nature of the invite is not obvious then the deterioration of democracy in the US should be cause for alarm.
Of course, this should be no surprise, considering the open calls to violence by Representatives Gaetz and Greene and Lieutenant General Flynn which have been said in public without any accountability or consequence.
On the post: Man Sues After Field Drug Test Says His Daughter's Ashes Are Meth And Ecstasy
Don't these tests now have a long and checkered history?
I'd think a defense lawyer could spend a day reading to the judge, prosecution and jury news article after news article after news article after news article of these tests yielding false positives, sometimes resulting in a false conviction and sending an innocent person to prison.
Or is this the end result of tough on crime policies, because Americans just want more warm bodies occupying our private penitentiaries?
On the post: The Flopping Of Trump's Blog Proves That It's Not Free Speech He's Upset About; But Free Reach
Very fine people
Trump, advised by his handlers, added context to obfuscate what was clearly an endorsement of white supremacist groups endorsing replacement theory one of whom launched a lethal attack on counter-protestors, killing one.
Trump was covering his ass while at the same time resenting he had to cover his ass. Now, enough of the GOP is afraid of him (and the rest of us see his dog tubas) that he doesn't bother.
Trump is very much the monster we knew he was in 2015 and 2016. He made it clear what it was. That just happened to appeal to a lot of people: Create a mythical past where the overclass held power that was allegedly better than today, and administrate to return to that era, as if it were true, even if it means treating the underclass as subhuman.
Fascism.
Even the idiots who didn't get it was a con by a liar got that Trump was the obliterate-the-nonwhites president. And today, that's all the GOP is.
On the post: The Flopping Of Trump's Blog Proves That It's Not Free Speech He's Upset About; But Free Reach
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Like Saudi Arabia?
On the post: The Flopping Of Trump's Blog Proves That It's Not Free Speech He's Upset About; But Free Reach
If the Democrats didn’t stand in the way of closing travel from China and the boarder stayed remain in Mexico; it’s likely it would have remained rather low numbers.
Am I reading this right? You believe that closing the borders after we already knew COVID-19 was in the general population was somehow going to help keep the numbers low?
I'd say you are either delusional or terrible at math, but I bet this is a thing like young-earth creationists who espouse falsehood under orders.
Your arguments may be pragmatic bad faith, but they're bad faith nonetheless, and it's an act of hostility just to make them. You're trolling.
On the post: Twitch Yanks Advertising Revenue From Popular 'Hot Tub Streamer' With No Warning Or Dialogue
Our western societies don't like it when women utilize their own sexuality to augment their market (contrast when a corporation uses young sexualized teens to sell clothes or cars). I'd say it was a US thing, but it notoriously happened in the endgame Soviet Union and Mafya-run Russia in the 90s. (Young women selling themselves curiously correlates with failing economies)
We don't mind porn. We mind when women benefit from porn. We don't mind using sex to sell so long as it's clear the body in question is an employee of a larger entity.
On the post: Scammers Use The Public's Fear Of Copyright Culture To Trick People Into Installing Malware
Related, and I'll probably post it again.
In the podcast You're Wrong About Michael Hobbes tells the story of The Chicks (the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks) and their rise to fame before getting cancelled(-ish) by the right-wing anti-fandom media talk engine.
One of the smaller bits is about their early albums before the incident. But Dan Rather notes that Sony made about $150 million from the sales and so the artists themselves should have gotten about $50 million of that, right?
Less than one million. IIRC about $500,000. It lead to a big lawsuit and was the beginning of the end of the Chicks as a country band for daring to rock the boat. Hobbes goes into some detail about how Hollywood Accounting is much like hospital billing, in which expenses charges are overinflated to deplete artist royalties.
Copyright as it is today is giant rent-seeking scams, and piracy is minimally unethical by comparison, and the story of the Chicks is one out of hundreds (if not thousands).
Regardless, it's the most recent ep as of today, found here. Definitely worth the hour-ish listen.
On the post: Governments Around The World Want To Require Local Employees Of Internet Firms, So They Have People To Jail
Yeah, this smacks of the whole CIA torture program, and of the UK Prime Minister sending goons to collect and smash some hard drives belonging to a news agency: Some aristocrats in government are angry due to recent events, and since some sense of justice (whether deserved or not) isn't forth coming, they want to hurt someone and so grab the nearest stranger that looks appropriate, whether Arab-looking Americans, or news agencies or bottom-rung employees of an internet service.
Since the internet services in question are huge and already notoriously don't care much about their bottom-rung employees, it doesn't take much thought to realize this won't actually do anything to large businesses (but will hurt smaller ones who can't usually move their VIPs offshore anyway).
It does illustrate how ours is still a world of plutocrats and peons, in which the former group still have folks in the latter group whipped for their enjoyment.
On the post: South Dakota Court Says Government Doesn't Need To Pay For Home Cops Destroyed To Find A Fugitive Who Wasn't There
Virtually no blacks in South Dakota
I bet they have an underclass or three they might like to displace. Indians? Immigrants? Gays? Darwinists? Unitarians? Cat owners?
On the post: Why Is Wired So Focused On Misrepresenting Section 230?
Americans using diaereses
...Also Mr. Lovecraft was fond of them.
When metal bands use them, they're ümlauts.
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