Hyman Rosen’s Techdirt Profile

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  • Oct 25th, 2021 @ 6:30am

    Qualified Immunity

    Doing away with QI would let a million lawsuits bloom. Personal injury lawyers are salivating over the prospect. The knee-in-the-back case is pretty telling. I can just imagine every interaction where police have to restrain someone being placed under a microscope to be second-guessed by a judge and jury. QI isn't applied too broadly when there are hordes who want to take down the police in any way possible.
  • Apr 12th, 2021 @ 9:27am

    Re: How much is it worth?

    It's worth infinity. Prosecuting and punishing people who prey on others should be the first order of business for local governments. Looking out for the interests of the dregs of society should come last.

  • Jun 9th, 2020 @ 3:21pm

    (untitled comment)

    The proper response to you coming to burn a police car is to shoot you. As much as you think you deserve to commit violence against the system, if you do so, the system should respond to you in kind. That the system is being violent regardless makes no difference.

  • Jun 4th, 2020 @ 12:25pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Counter-Insurrection

    The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

    LIberals (all people, really) pick a side and then pretend that no one on their side is evil. But the rampaging looting mob is evil. They are evil even if their behavior is rooted in systemic racism, in histories of oppression, in poverty, in slavery, in the behavior of the police. Liberals refuse to see that regardless of what caused someone on their side to be evil, once they are evil, they must be dealt with, to remove the evil from society so that the people who are not evil need not live in fear.

    Evil people look for opportunity to be evil, and if they can cloak themselves in righteousness and social justice in order to help themselves do evil, they will do that, because they're evil. If liberals are going to be willfully blind to this, they will be reminded at the ballot box, and that would be a misfortune.

  • Jun 4th, 2020 @ 12:04pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Counter-Insurrection

    LIkely true. You should get enough other people to believe that so that my policies lose at the ballot box. Go for it!

  • Jun 4th, 2020 @ 8:56am

    Re: Re: Counter-Insurrection

    People participating in violent insurrection are soldiers in a war. Soldiers in wars get killed by by people who oppose what they're doing. That tf.

  • Jun 4th, 2020 @ 8:54am

    Re: Re: Counter-Insurrection

    I am part of the problem because, aside from voting, I don't do anything to help improve civil society. I, too, am fundamentally lazy.

    I am not the cause of the riots. I am the excuse for the riots.

  • Jun 4th, 2020 @ 8:41am

    Re: Re: The Sons of Martha

    Thank you for demonstrating my point. Declaring yourself as a slave with little recourse is a great way to indulge the fundamental desire to be lazy without feeling any guilt about it. You will be a slave without recourse after the police cars burn, even more than you are now.

    Stacy Abrams has an op-ed in the NY Times today about how necessary it is to vote, even when voting feels like an inadequate and useless response that will change nothing.

    A nation of three hundred million people isn't going to turn to follow your will because you proclaim yourself as the fount of wisdom for how our lives should be lived. If you want things to change, you must work to convince enough others that your way is correct, so that they collectively choose to make those changes. It will not be quick, and you are likely to fail if your proposals are too radical. That's how it goes. And if you succumb to the temptation to use violence to get your way quickly, expect that violence will be used against you to keep you from succeeding. (And violence may be used against you regardless, because, unfortunately, that is also how it goes.)

  • Jun 3rd, 2020 @ 7:19pm

    Counter-Insurrection

    The proposal to REAP seems to assume that the proposer's feelings are shared by everyone. That's manifestly not the case. If I thought someone burning a police car had a chance of pulling off an insurrection successfully, and I had the means, I would have no compunctions about shooting them, because I do not want to live in the society that this person wants to bring about. I doubt I'm alone. The police car burners and looters aren't going to get their revolution for free. They will get a civil war, just like the neo-Nazis want. And then they will lose, because we will get our own version of Duterte, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Modi, ... who will promise security and be welcomed for it.

  • Jun 3rd, 2020 @ 6:29pm

    The Sons of Martha

    The actions of the police and the calls for violence against them are both symptoms of the problem, not causes or solutions. Kipling said it best over a century ago in his poem, The Sons of Martha:
    They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.
    They do not teach that His Pity allows them to leave their job when they damn-well choose.

    We are fundamentally lazy. We keep hoping that we can launch fire-and-forget systems that will maintain themselves without further effort on our part. That can never work. If we want a responsive and user-friendly police force, we must maintain oversight over the police. If we want bridges not to fall, we must repair them. If we do not want to drive over potholes, we must fill them. If we want to keep the ability to abort a fetus, we cannot rely on Roe v Wade to do the job for us forever. If we want good things, we must find ways to pay the people who provide them.

    And paroxysms of violence against the system will help no more than allowing it to run itself without guidance. When all the stores are looted and all the police cars are burned, nothing will have changed aside from immiserating everyone who did not have the means to leave, if people do not pick up the reins of government and never put them down.

    I saw the same thing twenty years ago when I was working on Y2K fixes. People with vague apocalyptic hopes that everything would come crashing down and then somehow a utopia would magically rise from the ashes. It's a stupidity so monumental that it could only be believed by humans. How anyone can look anywhere in the world, where revolutions and insurrections have led to nothing but disaster, and think that we should have that here, is unfathomable, except that we are the same people of whom half elected a moronic piece of filth to be our president, so perhaps it's no wonder that the other half of us would choose an equally stupid and evil way forward.

  • Jul 22nd, 2019 @ 11:17pm

    1st Amendment?

    What does any of this have to do with the first amendment?

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

  • Nov 26th, 2018 @ 8:57am

    CPAP "spying"

    It's not secret. I've known about this since I got my machine. Maybe it's just people who don't use CPAP who are surprised?

    I assume the point is to make sure that no one is signing up fake users in order to bill insurance companies for supplies that are never used.

    I find moral panics over privacy to be baffling, so the fact that my CPAP machine reports my sleep habits doesn't bother me at all. I have some vague hope that there is someone looking at the data who would notice a problem and notify me about it, and otherwise I don't care.

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