• 0 Posts
  • 44 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 1st, 2023

help-circle




  • JFC, I hope there’s a real investigation and the people responsible get fired and prosecuted.

    Someone, claiming to be a ‘retired cop’, came to the authorities claiming that some jackass mixed real bullets in with the blanks in the hope of causing an issue on set. The ‘retired cop’ brought some of those bullets and offered to testify under oath. The bullets were not added to evidence in the rust investigation, rather they were filed under a different ID so it was never turned over to the defense. I quote ‘retired cop’ because when this came up at trial, no one was even able to verify if they were actually a retired cop at trial. It appears that they either didn’t bother to validate it, or knew he was a retired cop and it was pretty damming that they suppressed the evidence. (there’s a bunch of other things here too, like the prosecutor knowing about these bullets but used a cell phone picture of them to ‘compare’ them to the bullets recovered on set and magically knowing they were totally different and not worth perusing but not filing charges against the ‘retired cop’ for interfering in the investigation)

    The prosecution was either grossly negligent and ‘accidentally’ withheld evidence that could have been exculpatory. Or more likely deliberately suppressed it. Why deliberately? Apparently multiple witnesses the prosecutors interviewed told the defense that the lead procedure said some pretty vile things about Baldwin during the interviews. The lead prosecutor, under oath, was asked if she said these horrible things, and instead of denying it, said she something to the effect of ‘I don’t recall’. If you can’t recall if you called Baldwin a cock sucker during an interview, you shouldn’t be a prosecutor.

    This was an absolutely bonkers prosecution and trial. It’s like if your mechanic overfills your tires to 90 PSI and you have a blow out and kill someone, and being prosecuted because you should have personally validated the tires were safe to drive on.

    If anyone wants to see some vids:

    Defense listing all of the issues: https://youtu.be/KbSSa9_HPl8

    Lead prosecutor, testifying under oath for some reason, trying to cover her butt… This is not normal: https://youtu.be/WpDDsOBDwy0

    The entire channel has a bunch of great clips from the trail, no commentary, just what happened.

    This was BONKERS.


  • If anyone has ideas, please let me know.

    1. Keep voting against fascism, and eventually, if we are able to hold that line, the old guard will die off and we can get some real change. Ex: Dianne Feinstein, she’s gone now and we’re going to get Adam Schiff who’s better, or hopefully Katie Porter who’s even better than Schiff.

    2. Do what you can to people on board with better voting systems like ranked choice voting, approval voting, anything that gets us away from first past the post bullshit. Use it for game night, use it in the office, etc. Get it into the mainstream public conscious. Until enough people start asking why we don’t use it for elections.







  • An Advice of Counsel defense is basically saying “I’m not responsible for my actions because my lawyer said it was legal for me to do.” If that’s the case, Attorney Client Privilege is waved and all communication between trump and his lawyers (that said “it was OK”, not the current lawyers) should be provided as evidence. Basically provide the evidence to support the AoC defense.

    It’s basic discovery. trump is stalling for time, and cannon is helping. If trump goes with the AoC defense, day one of the trial is going to be him claiming AoC and the prosecutors asking for the relevant evidence to review which will stall the case because they’ll ‘need at least a month to get all the records together’ and then the prosecutors will need to review them, and I’m certain it will be the most unorganized mess handed off. Like shitty scans of faxes of the emails all off center and slightly rotated… So OCR will be a nightmare.


  • I reported you to the mod. It seemed to be the kind of thing I was escaping Reddit from. Am glad to hear you were not being an asshole. Certainly your reasonable tone later had me confused so I am glad I mentioned it.

    No worries, I guess it’s not as common as I think. I did talk with one of the other mods this morning and they understood what I was aiming for and didn’t think it should have been removed.

    I think we agree the right wing is getting the upper hand and out of hand despite public sympathy for Palestinian civilians.

    We do.

    Some of them probably are hypocritically subscribing to the “Elders of Zion” hoax while jumping on anything remotely anti-semitic from the Left.

    Boggles my mind.

    I do worry about a rise of anti-Semitism whether from the Left or the Right.

    Me too. Any kinda of ‘out-grouping or othering’ for that matter.


  • Even a “wife beater” can appreciate your points. However, if you will allow me to nitpick…

    I hope you know I wasn’t actually accusing you of being a wife beater. I thought it was the quintessential example of a loaded question and everyone knew of it… and would spark discussion about loaded questions. And how no matter what the response is, there’s an inflammatory headline that can be drawn from it that will squeak by a court of law. Apparently 1 mod didn’t know the reference.

    The statement was: “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”.

    I know, but it’s still not supporting genocide, or the violence in general.

    And those kind of public statements were a gift for Likud who love escalation and now are making statements of their own (even less ambiguous) in favour of genocide.

    Absolutely, they’re taking what was said out of context and turning it into propaganda.

    The Western left wing got played by Hamas and Likud are now making the most of it.

    Yup. Some of the blame rests with the American right wing too. Instead of trying to diffuse the situation, they poured fuel on the fire. They’re looking for any way to damage the left and don’t care about the cost. Instead of calling the statement insensitive victim blaming, and trying to calm things down, they lied to boost themselves and hurt others. This would not be propaganda for Hamas or Likud without the American right wing’s assistance.


  • Calling for genocide vs supporting genocide…

    They did neither. Saying the conduct of Israel over the past few decades resulted in the attack is a gross over simplification of the situation, but it is not supporting the attack. Just like saying the ‘house burned down because the owner left oily rags next to the furnace’ is not celebrating the house burning down. It’s a statement on what they believe led up to the house burning down, correct, or incorrect.

    It is however a nuanced difference Gay should have articulated in Congress. Maybe she did. Is there full video footage? I only found the snippet.

    I haven’t seen the full video either. It may exist, but I’m pretty sure it was not released (google is crap these days, it’s only giving me stuff about her recent resignation). This was a right wing hit job. Releasing snippets, rather than the entire thing is by design. Even if she did have a a good response, it won’t be released in time. All we get is the gotcha loaded questions of her looking sympathetic to genocide.

    Having now seen Gay’s belated but reasonable response printed by BBC I don’t think she should have been fired over the Gaza issue.

    And that’s the point of the gotcha loaded questions. They get released, the public gets angry, before the situation can be properly explained. I think it’s very likely that a democrat questioned her too and she was able to give a good response, but since the republicans are in control of the house that didn’t make it out. This may be the cause of the belated response, thinking the entire thing would come out. Harvard probably got a TON of donors calling saying they would withdraw support if she didn’t leave. And she did what most goodhearted people would do, resign to minimize the damage to the college that she cares about.


  • lol, what?

    So we’ve gone from the students were literally screaming for genocide, to OK so they were expressing how they think Israel brought this on themselves, which is like basically calling for genocide. That’s moving the goal post 3 towns over.

    Disagree with their statement all you like, the students were not calling for violence, let alone genocide. The school should not take action against them. Future employers is probably going to be a different thing though.

    Do you at least see that “Is calling for the genocide of Jews harassment and against university policy?” a loaded question now? Because the premise is 100% false.


  • Spoiler, the students were NOT calling for genocide:

    AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The chant uttered during recent demonstrations is being misrepresented. Protestors aren’t saying “We want Jewish genocide,” but “Israel, we charge you with genocide.” Experts and advocates say it’s a typical refrain heard at pro-Palestinian rallies. –https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-israel-hamas-ucla-penn-genocide-057006125279

    It’s false on it’s face, and just misinformation.

    The questions asked of Claudine Gay were deliberately loaded questions. Any answer to “Is calling for the genocide of Jews harassment and against university policy?” can, and will, be picked apart into out-of-context soundbites for right wing media to blast out.

    Saying that it’s against university policy will be twisted into a free speech issue.

    Saying students are free to protest gets twisted into being pro genocide.

    Any reasonable nuanced statement that correctly captures the complexity of the situation gets interrupted by republican in congress and spliced into tiny damming sounding soundbites played nonstop on right wing media.

    People need to stop falling for this BS.

    Here’s the thing, she should resign, not for this, but for the plagiarism… And I fully believe that the plagiarism was known first and that is why she was targeted because of it. If there was no plagiarism, in a few weeks this would die down, she could explain how nuanced the answer is, a balance between freedom of speech/expression, and students on campus feeling safe, etc.

    But with the plagiarism issue, even people like me who see this as an obvious farce have to agree she needs to go. So even though the first part is loaded question BS, she gets ousted and right wing media get to claim her head as some liberal boogie man they took down. Not the real issue she needs to step down, the plagiarism.



  • It’s not ‘terrible’, but it does have issues just like every other voting system. It’s significantly better than what we have now.

    Approval voting simplifies things but also has limitations because it removes any weight/preference people may have. If 55% vote for A, and B, but prefer A over B, and 45% vote B and C, but prefer C over B… B wins but 55% of the voters preferred A. Same exact issue you’re raising with RCV but occurs more often with approval than RCV.

    Keep fighting the good fight, but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.