Markass
Not the worst
User ID: 3843
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
Desktop Linux (distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, NixOS) and Android OSes are so fundamentally different that it's not very useful to describe both of those categories as being "Linux". Though I suspect @nomagicpill put "being a Linux user" on the list tongue-in-cheek.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
If she doesn't like movies I think it was the right call not to make her see it. It's a good movie, but it's not such a good movie that someone who doesn't even have an appetite for cinema in the first place is going to like it.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
Has anyone seen Markiplier's new film, Iron Lung? (Mild spoilers ahead.) I saw it today. It's leagues better than any "Youtuber" movie in that it made me feel like I was watching an actual movie that could have been produced by a major studio. It's literally just that good, and a breath of fresh air compared to the usual sequel/adaptation slop that passes for filmmaking today.
I think it could have been shorter though. There were a few scenes (for example
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
It should be noted that SCOTUS didn't rule directly on officer-created jeopardy, just said that the "moment of threat" doctrine is wrong and totality of the circumstances is correct and sent the case back to the lower court for them to make the ruling with the proper standard. Does anyone know if the ruling has come out yet or if there are rulings for other cases with officer-created jeopardy made under the totality of the circumstances?
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
It's still a 0.1% chance, meaning that she just got very unlucky. It could be argued that she was attempting to flee but did not realize an ICE agent was in the path of her vehicle, and I would describe that as being unlucky.
The best way to maximize your health and longevity is to not get into physical confrontations with ICE, or really any law enforcement agency for that matter. You are far more likely to lose the fight than the cop is.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
Interesting to see how the level of outrage Trump gets for capturing Maduro is orders of magnitude more than the outrage levied at Obama for extrajudicial killings.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
My stance is that we should wait for further information and investigation. What we have so far doesn't look good, but I'm not going to jump to calling them murderers when there's reasonable doubt over things like if the first shot was even commanded.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
Federal agents cannot be prosecuted by the state for actions that occur during their duties. They can only be prosecuted at the federal level. He'll be fine, or at least safe from the MN government apparatus.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
It's a shame the Parkland and Uvalde school district law enforcement who were directly responsible for the school were not convicted.
The laws on child endangerment just weren't made for them. For example, in the Parkland case, for the charge to stick they had to argue with a straight face that the deputy was somehow a caretaker of the children, as in he would have been giving them meals and monitoring them to make sure they don't do anything stupid. Obviously, that's not the case, so he was acquitted.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
They can in fact just be wrong about CK and right about RG. But I sincerely doubt that they just happened to arrive at those two different conclusions independently. I think it's highly likely there is a flawed reasoning process behind the two different conclusions, and the flaws of that reasoning process made them wrong on CK.
My point is that that is not reasonable. He should have know that it was far more likely that she was just trying to drive away.
With him in her path? That means he was about to be seriously injured. In fact, he suffered internal bleeding as a result of the collision.
It doesn't matter. You keep trying to argue this as though the police have the right to assume the worst and respond accordingly. They don't.
Her behaviour was evidence of being non-threatening. He doesn't need abssolute proof that she wouldn't have hurt him in order to not be justified in killing him. No police officer ever has that. You cannot pull someone over for speeding and shoot them in the head just because sometimes people who get pulled over for speeding are dangerous.
That is not what I am saying. My point was that her "non-threatening" behavior doesn't matter, when she in fact exhibited behavior that threatened the life and bodily integrity of Jonathan Ross, and was an imminent deadly threat to him.
Conversely, a man can be the most deranged person in the world. He can murder 50 people and shoot off bullets into the neighborhood. He can lead officers on a high-speed chase and crash several innocent bystanders. He can exhibit a motherload of threatening behaviors, is what I'm saying. However, if at the end of the chase he gives up, gets out of his car, puts his hands up and lets the officers cuff him? There is no way that the police are allowed to shoot him. Ever.
You absolutely have to justify it. It's just very easy to justify.
You have to justify that the robber was a deadly threat to you. You don't have to justify that he was trying to kill you, but it doesn't hurt your case to do so. You seem to think intentions (from all parties involved) matter more than they really do.
Someone driving a car in your general direction is not remotely similar in how threatening it is.
"General direction" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. I would use "general direction" to describe being maybe 10 to 20 feet away from a car. I would not use it to describe literally being next to it.
No, the risk of being killed by being hit by the car.
On a purely physical/biological/medical level, maybe. But on a legal/moral level? What I said still applies. He doesn't have to calculate what kind of injury he could be suffering before he can respond to a deadly threat. It doesn't matter if it that means it was less likely that he would die, the level of risk was already too high, because it's a deadly threat.
There has to be an actual risk to others. It can't just be hypothetical or else that would always justify shooting fleeing suspects, which we know is not allowed.
You said someone walking down the sidewalk might have a bomb hidden underneath his jacket. You need to clarify how much the police know in this situation. It's your hypothetical example after all.
If they don't know anything at all and have no reason to suspect him in particular over any other person walking down the sidewalk, then they aren't allowed to do anything, not even detain him.
If they have a reasonable suspicion that he has a hidden bomb, then per Terry v. Ohio, they are allowed to at least detain him at gunpoint and search him. If he flees rather than letting himself be searched, then Tennessee v. Garner applies.
She does have the right to flee without being shot.
No, she doesn't have the right to flee, period. Now, an officer may or may not have the right to shoot a fleeing suspect, but that's a separate discussion.
He does not have the right to make it so that she cannot flee without creating a sufficient threat to him that he would be justified in shooting her.
On what grounds? And anyway, it's not clear that he even intended to do that.
It's not binary. There are always low probability deadly threats everywhere. Their probabilities rise and fall continuously. He needed to wait until it reached a certain level before killing her.
Self-defense does not operate on continuous probabilities. No self-defender is ever thinking "what is the probability of a deadly threat?" I mean, seriously, have you thought through what would go through a self-defender's mind in a scenario?
Let's say you're a clerk and a guy walks in your store. He's wearing a hoodie, a face mask and sunglasses. Well, it's a bit suspicious, but he's not a deadly threat. Then he walks over to the counter, maybe puts some cigarettes and beer on there. Okay, still not a deadly threat. And now let's say he pulls out a gun and points it at you. Now he is a deadly threat, and you are justified to shoot him.
There is no point where you as the clerk is going to think "he is a deadly threat, but I have to wait because... the probability hasn't risen enough yet?" At each moment, you'll either think "not a deadly threat" or "deadly threat." You may have suspicions from his hoodie and mask, you may even pay more attention to him, but until he pulls out the gun he is not a deadly threat, and you cannot pull out your own gun either.
Put simply, it's bad advice or easily misinterpreted advice to put "waiting" and "deadly threat" in the same sentence (with regards to the legalities).
That's what they're already doing 99.999999% of the time.
Because 99.9% of the time there is no deadly threat that they can see. It wouldn't even register in their mind. When there is a deadly threat, often that's the first time they think about something being a deadly threat. At that point, there's no legal reason to wait, and it's bad advice to talk about being sure that you have legal standing or whatever before acting on a deadly threat.
They absolutely do have a duty to retreat in some situations.
Which ones? Which laws say this?
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
No, I don't.
Why not?
I don't need to watch it to think about what I would have done in that situation. I only need to have watched it to figure out what he would have already known having been there.
You keep thinking that he would have known more than what a reasonable officer put in his same position would have known. My point was that perhaps watching it multiple times biases you to see certain things as obvious and known when they were not.
Being a police officer is not like playing a video game.
I agree! But if you're saying this, then you don't seem to appreciate my point enough, so let me rephrase. He only gets to go through the situation once, he does not get to do it again. You, however, get to watch it multiple times. You are the one who is playing a video game. And, for that matter, everyone who is discussing this situation (including me). It's why I discount a lot of things in the videos that may seem "obvious" to you, because I can't imagine that I could do any better were I to be placed in the same position and didn't know what was going to happen. If I knew how everything was going to play out, I could definitely handle the situation without using deadly force. But if I had to go through it for the first time and had no idea what she was going to do? I don't think so.
Imagine if all knowledge of this event was erased and you had to watch the video again for the first time. Do you really think that you would have noticed all the things in the video that you argue he should have known? Do you notice these sorts of details in any video you watch for the first time? There's that famous experiment of the gorilla walking by in the background of a video of people playing basketball, and people (focused on counting the number of passes) consistently fail to notice the gorilla. You seem to think that you could notice the gorilla, if you watched the video for the first time without knowing that there was going to be a gorilla. Is that right?
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
Yes, there is.
Which one?
No, that is not correct. Not everything is allowed. It must be necessary to stop the threat. If you can stop the threat without killing someone, you cannot kill them.
There are several problems with this argument.
You cannot intentionally kill them. But if they are an imminent deadly threat, you are allowed to shoot them. Once they are no longer an imminent deadly threat, you are not allowed to shoot them anymore. If you shoot them during the window of time in which they are an imminent deadly threat, then any consequences to the bad guy are not really any of your concern. So yes, you can kill them, but you cannot intentionally do it. However, in the moment, whether your bullets will actually kill them is completely unknowable, and also not something you should care about if you are facing an imminent deadly threat. That's why we talk about using force, such as ordinary force or deadly force. We don't talk about killing, and the fact that you are saying "killing" screams to me that you fundamentally misunderstand self-defense law.
Your last sentence, "If you can stop the threat without killing someone, you cannot kill them" also seems to be confusing different levels of force. Yes, if someone is merely an ordinary threat, you cannot use deadly force to stop them. If someone is pepper-spraying you, for example, you are not allowed to shoot them. However, I've established that I'm talking about a deadly force scenario, i.e. a man pointing a gun at you. There is no such law that says that if you can stop him without using deadly force, that you must do so (besides duty-to-retreat states that mandate you must retreat if you can do safely, but it's not clear that can be done here). He is a deadly threat, so you can respond to him using deadly force. It's that simple.
It's a bad example because throwing a coffee mug could help.
Are you saying that a coffee mug is able to stop a guy who's pointing a gun at you?
But my point still stands. If your response to a deadly threat is ineffective or futile, that doesn't mean you lose the claim to self-defense.
No. If he was able to recognize the threat in time to take out his gun, he could have moved out of the way instead.
He could have, but with a short time frame for him to respond to the threat, it's unreasonable to expect him to pick that option at the drop of a dime. Humans don't think that quick. Are you familiar with the OODA loop? It takes time to observe the threat, orient himself to it, decide his course of action, and then act on it. If he was thinking about multiple options, it takes time to decide between them, but it's highly likely that -- since this happened so quickly -- he wasn't even thinking about moving out of the way. He literally made a split-second decision. This is why I continue to think that you're viewing this situation with 20/20 hindsight. You keep ascribing more ability and knowledge to him than what a reasonable officer put in the same circumstances would have had.
But I don't think you appreciate that the evidence against him is cumulative.
I disagree. The totality of the circumstances points in his favor. You (and others) keep raising many different arguments that are just invalid by themselves. I don't seriously think that he's innocent just because of one refuted argument, I think he's innocent because he did almost everything right and his conduct reflects the elements of lawful self-defense.
You seem to think that he has the right to assume the absolute worst case scenario at every point in order to justify self-defence, when in reality, the totality of the evidence needs to rise to a certain level.
I do not think that a self-defender has the right to assume the absolute worst case scenario. There are, however, certain assumptions they may make depending on the circumstances. For example, the quintessential example of the robber pointing a gun at you. You are allowed to assume that he is willing to shoot and kill you. You can even assume that his gun is real and that it's loaded. Yes, there have been many cases where a bad guy points a fake gun at someone, gets shot by a good guy, and dies. The good guy is 100% in the clear, because to any reasonable person, a fake gun looks as real of a gun as any.
You can make the argument that assuming the robber has a real and loaded gun and is willing to use it is assuming the absolute worst case scenario, and you would be right, because robbers don't usually use (fake) guns to kill, they usually use it for intimidation. But in this case, it's fine to assume the absolute worst case scenario, and to shoot him in self-defense.
It depends on the circumstances. A vehicle that is completely stationary and not moving throughout the course of an interaction? There is no argument in the world that it could be a deadly threat. A vehicle that is accelerating towards you, though? A completely different story.
As we saw at Derek Chauvin's trial, what counts as reasonable behaviour for a police officer is determined by what his training is and what the standard procedure is, both of which if violated at multiple points.
No, what counts as lawful self-defense is determined by the totality of the circumstances. Training and standard procedure may factor into it, but it does not determine it alone. Chauvin kneeled on a man's neck for several minutes, when he wasn't a deadly threat, and when it was unnecessary for him to do so to restrain him. That alone would violate the law regardless of what training and standard procedure say, and his situation is completely opposite to a quick, seconds-long encounter where an officer faced an imminent deadly threat and was forced to make a split-second decision to respond to it.
It's not relevant what we know in hindsight. What matters is what he should have known in the situation.
You then list several things that are irrelevant, are things he could not have known, or ascribe greater-than-human ability to him, all of which I (and others) have already gone over with you. Again, I still think you're operating with 20/20 hindsight.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
The fundamental problem is that there's just no law saying a police officer has to protect anyone. See Castle Rock v. Gonzales and Warren v. DC. That's why they've gone with child endangerment charges, which is a huge stretch compared to something more relevant. It's the same tactic they tried with that Parkland deputy who also did nothing during a school shooting, and he got acquitted too.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
I wonder how gun control advocates have responded to the fact that police have no obligation to protect anyone, if they have even addressed that at all. It's already bad enough that in the best case scenario, the police are only minutes away when seconds matter. But the fact that police can and have done nothing at all? I would be interested in seeing their counterargument for why people shouldn't arm themselves and have the ability to be their own first responder.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
To be a devil's advocate (I don't morally agree with Gonzales' acquittal), we have the draft because it matters quite a lot to the continued existence of our country. Some kids dying in mass shootings is tragic, but rare, even when compared to other gun deaths, and it's not a threat to the nation as a whole. An invasion from a foreign power has much more serious consequences.
Now I'm just saying that's the platonic ideal of the draft. Whether in practice the military actually wages wars that are necessary for the survival of the US, that's an entirely different matter.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
If we want to rehash the political free speech moderation argument great, but that's a totally different "digital commons" argument
Actually, the two are more related than you think. A lot of Youtube's censorship decisions come from advertiser pressure. They don't want to see their brand next to a "brand risk", so Youtube decides to ban the content rather than risk losing advertisers.
I don't think arguments about who owns something is a satisfactory way to resolve questions about it being a commons. If you're arguing from a purely legal perspective, cool, but people here are talking from a moral perspective. If the water company in your area suddenly became private and had the legal right to refuse service to anyone, and they started forcing you to use certain sinks of theirs that had advertisements, would you really say that they're not polluting the commons, because it's not the commons, it's their party and you have to play by their rules?
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
That a bunch of people decided to hang out on it doesn't mean it becomes public property, some kind of digital squatter's rights, like if enough people hang out on my lawn it becomes a park.
This is an inaccurate analogy. It's like if you had a big lawn that could host a billion people, and you let anyone hang out there for free, and there were certain people who were giving speeches drawing crowds of millions on your lawn, and them moving their speeches elsewhere was just prohibitively expensive for some reason such that basically no one ever did it and we laugh at the ones who tried because they all failed miserably.
I guess I should draw a distinction between private property, the commons, and a monopoly. I think it's clear that Youtube has quite the monopoly on online video distribution. The competition doesn't come even close. With their monopoly, they effectively own the commons as their private property with regards to video. In the absence of competition, how is it fair that one company gets to decide who is and isn't allowed to speak on a hugely influential platform?
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
That's a bit of a dodge, don't you think? When everyone uses them, they are practically the commons. Youtube is a good example, having network effects so profound that no one dares even think about hosting their own video distribution website. Even the creators on there are called "Youtubers" which underlines how much they are tied to the platform.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
If it's such a burden for Youtube, maybe they should stop focusing on maximizing watch time and keeping people on the site resulting in screen addiction, one of the many ills of modern society.
I think Youtube being so centralized and massive is itself a big problem. Rather than people hosting their own websites where they distribute their own videos and eventually finding ways to distribute videos cheaply, people just decided to outsource video hosting to Youtube, and now they've built up a huge network effect where you can't simply take all your videos and move to a different site, and even if you could you can't just take all your viewers with you. Even the content creators on this service are called "Youtubers" rather than creators. Separately, centralization poses huge questions for archival and preservation of a huge aspect of our culture. What happens if the entire thing goes down? Youtube is even actively hostile to downloading videos and archival efforts, they likely threatened the youtube-dl developers into going away, and the replacement fork yt-dlp is constantly having to make changes and is slowly weakening in accessibility and usability through no fault of their own.
I wasn't expecting to write an anti-Youtube screed, but this is how I feel. I guess my answer is that I don't care if Youtube has to bleed money to provide a service without ads, because the consequences of that are more desirable than the status quo.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
I was about to say this. Seriously, don't threaten me with a good time. Many of the ills wrought by the Internet are because everyone is on it now, especially children. Kids have no reason to be online, and when they are they are easy targets for groomers, and that results in several poorly-thought-out government-led policy initiatives that are a headache for everyone (e.g. the UK "Online Safety Act"). But is it possible to go back to the early web? I don't know.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
I value anonymity enough that I'm not going to give out my credit card information, tying my account to my real life identity, just to remove ads. That information is begging to be leaked in a data breach anyway.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
All that's left after you remove those are hobbies or charity, like TheMotte or Wikipedia, which probably can't exist without the infrastructure built by the advertising-funded products anyway.
What about Kiwi Farms? As far as I'm aware it is funded entirely by donations and Null maintains his own infrastructure.
Markass
Not the worst
5mo ago
I believe that speakers can choose whichever pronoun they want to use to refer to anyone. You can call this something like pronoun anarchy. I emphasize that they are already able to, not just that they should, because there's really no good way to enforce using preferred pronouns. You can butt in and say "use these pronouns" but there's no way you can actually force someone to say those pronouns.
This applies to the ones who want to affirm trans people too. I'm not saying you can't call Dylan a her. If you want to, go right ahead. You have that liberty, just as I have the liberty to call him a he.
Europe's strategy seems to be to bring down the U.S. tech sector by attempting to impose more onerous regulations like GDPR on it. See, for example, the "Online Safety Act" and how the UK's Ofcom is unsuccessfully enforcing it by emailing threats to American companies, notably ones not under UK jurisdiction.
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