benmmurphy
4mo ago
As far as I'm aware Trump is not being prosecuted for threats of violence because he never threatened violence. The federal indictment seems to be around what is being referred to as the 'fake electors' plot and trying to get Pence to reject certification. But if you look at historical challenges to election results the parties who have challenged the results have used similar 'fake electors'.
benmmurphy
26d ago
the federal government is not sending their best: https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/delhi-township/james-burk-atf-agent-charged-with-stealing-wine-from-kroger?_amp=true
Police say ATF agent James Burk took expensive wine to the self-checkout lane and charged himself a small percent of the cost.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
I don't think that is a fair characterization of what people wanted the Pence to do. The problem was after certification occurred even if the fraud was found it would be unlikely that the courts would allow the final result as certified to be overturned. The idea was to send the contested results back to the states so the irregularities could be properly investigated before certification.
The most similar election was in 1876. It didn't involve the VP rejecting certification himself and infact there was controversy over who had the power to count the votes during certification but there are very strong parallels and no-one was prosecuted for what happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election
benmmurphy
1mo ago
I guess he will get a gold coffin, nationwide protests and calls to defund the ATF.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
it was just a protest that got out of hand. a similar thing happened in Australia except it was the left protesting against a right wing government, i'm sure the right tried to make it out like it was the end of the world but i don't think anyone ended up serving 20 year prison sentences because of what happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Parliament_House_riot
benmmurphy
4mo ago
the situation is weird because the allegations are part of the text of the indictment but Trump is not actually being charged for incitement or anything else in regards to the Jan 6th riot. his lawyers tried to get that part of the indictment removed because they believed it was irrelevant and potentially prejudicial to a jury but the judge did not agree and let the text stand as-is. here is the text of his motion: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24078250-motion-to-strike-inflammatory-allegations
The indictment includes repeated references to the actions of independent actors at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. See: ... The indictment does not charge President Trump with responsibility for any of these actions.
And here is the judges opinion for reference: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148.158.0_1.pdf
An uncharitable reading as to why this text was included in the indictment could be so that third parties reporting on the indictment could muddle things for their audience and give the impression that Trump was being charged for the Jan 6th riots. I believe a similar thing may have happened with the statement by former intelligence officials about the Hunter Biden laptop. If you read the statement on the hunter biden laptop it doesn't actually say anything useful but other people could then portray the statement as saying something meaningful. The way the media works is kind of similar to chinese whispers but if you are aware of this then its possible to manipulate it for your benefit.
benmmurphy
6mo ago
I enjoyed the bit where Hollywood cashed in twice
benmmurphy
3mo ago
its interesting that part 2 mentions the pipe bombs. the fake pipe bombs were very weird. apparently, they were placed the night before and there is video of someone suspected of placing of the bombs but one of them (or both?) used a 60 minute kitchen timer as the pretend detonation source. now, its gets weirder because apparently someone 'found' one of the bombs at a point in time where the timing made it look like it would explode around the time of certification. this was partly covered by an interview in congress: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/republicans-release-new-information-january-6-pipe-bomb-investigation and FBI Director Wray's testimony: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DaL5RM-ZYt0 the cell phone data from the area was also mysteriously corrupted which impeded any investigation.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
that's a very cheeky opinion by the court. they find that the 14th amendment doesn't apply to Trump so there is no finding against Trump but then include a bunch of disparaging stuff about him that will never been challenged on an appeal. but this courts opinion on Brandenburg would not be held up by higher courts. they even include a case where the plain language used by the accused was much worse than Trump and the the accused was not convicted but then magically read further than the plain language of Trump to find that he did commit insurrection.
This is kind of how policing was meant to be historically in the UK as I understand it. Police were meant to be just citizens that were being paid to do a job but having no special powers. Even now I think citizens can bring private criminal prosecutions to court. The Peelian principles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles) article on Wikipedia has some of the background on this. Also, due to historical fears UK police are generally unarmed except for special units. However, I guess as time has gone on the UK has drifted from policing from consent to a more policing by the state model.
As far as I’m aware if the police were prosecuting her under Part 3A 29B of the public order Act she has a clear defence because she was in a private dwelling and only people within that dwelling heard her. Now, maybe she is screwed because the police recorded it and the police then played the recording to people outside the dwelling but I think you can claim a defence that you reasonably believed your words would not be heard outside the dwelling. I suspect the reason for this defence is to cover situations where the accused is being secretly recorded. Of course it also completely ridiculous for the police to accuse you of a crime that they have facilitated by their own actions.
2)An offence under this section may be committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the written material is displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and are not heard or seen except by other persons in that or another dwelling.
In proceedings for an offence under this section it is a defence for the accused to prove that he was inside a dwelling and had no reason to believe that the words or behaviour used, or the written material displayed, would be heard or seen by a person outside that or any other dwelling.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64/part/3A
The whole situation is a bit sad because without the altercation at the end it does look like good community policing. Maybe the officer was just sick of being a glorified taxi driver for bratty girls and kicked off.
benmmurphy
5mo ago
riots are just a schelling point for dickheads
benmmurphy
4mo ago
It’s probably based off some narrow technical claim from an agency that is true. For example I’m guessing the number of electronic voting machines with no paper trail has decreased. So if you have a bunch of things you have been trying to improve and they have all improved since the last election and are the best they have ever been then you can claim it is the most secure ever. There might be other things that you don’t measure that have been going in a negative direction but because they aren’t part of the improvement plan they don’t exist.
benmmurphy
9mo ago
That article claimed Russia was openly waiting for Ukraine fatigue to set in but never provided any evidence to back this statement. Funnily enough the author of the article seems to be the disinformation Mary Poppins.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
It will also be interesting to see what happens to Couy Griffin (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/17/new-mexico-insurrectionist-fourteenth-amendment). I think these courts making 14th amendment decisions are screwed up. If there is either federal or state law that makes certain things a crime and punishment for that crime is that you lose the ability to hold office then I think that's fine. But courts making these decisions without a proper criminal trial with the opportunity for a jury and proper standards of evidence is broken. If you have a friendly judge you can basically remove someone from office for attending a protest where they have committed trespassing crimes.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
i like to pretend its not real and just modern art
benmmurphy
7mo ago
There is a lot of game theory based around this. Stuff like schelling points or when private knowledge is mysteriously transferred to shared or public knowledge due to action or inaction. There are a bunch of neat brain teaser puzzles based on this.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
There is a nice culture war troll angle with some parts of the Rust programming language community being associated with leftist political drama. Rust is a popular safe language that solves most memory safety issues and some thread safety issues. I can see someone authoring a bait piece about taking my 'freedumb' to use C++ from my cold dead hands and forcing me to use communist Rust.
If they used the term 'reverse racism' then I think that is weird to begin with. There is a category 'racism' and then there are subcategories 'racism against X from Y' and 'racism against Y from X' which I assume is what they want to discuss. I would answer false because the statement doesn't make any sense and nonsense statements are false. If you try and argue the statement is true then you arguing with one arm tied behind your back because you are already accepting the main premise behind the 'false' argument. I don't see why 'racism against X from Y' should be privileged linguistically so that there is a normal 'racism' and a 'reverse racism'. I think it is just lazy on their part to use the term 'racism' when they really mean 'racism by the majority group in a country' or something similar. surprisingly, it can be difficult to know what they mean if they don't explicitly say it.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
Maybe they used something like this: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/natural-family-planning/
There is also a longshot theory that the FBI 'reformed' and suppressed the Hunter laptop story because they were worried it was going to be another Steele Dossier situation. Assuming the FBI was acting politically neutral they may have been worried that Giuliani was manipulating them like the DNC had manipulated them with the Steele Dossier. However, this doesn't seem to be consistent with the FBI positively claiming the laptop was Russian disinformation. I think there is a big difference between looking at a situation skeptically and taking positive action to spread falsehoods. When they were asked about authenticity of the laptop it seems they could have just gone for some cop-out where they don't affirm or deny the authenticity.
I think there is also a chance that this might end up being used as a 'defence' for the FBI's institutional behaviour if there is an investigation into what went on. "We learnt a lot from the IG report into Crossfire Hurricane about dealing with politically sensitive individuals where information is brought to us from people who have clear conflicts of interest but we just went overboard in the wrong direction and this caused us to make mistakes when dealing with the Hunter Biden situation."
benmmurphy
4mo ago
There is another problem which is they are effectively claiming Trump is disqualified from office if he was elected. But they cannot know this because it would be possible for the house and senate to remove this disqualification before he began serving. Whether Trump is disqualified or not at the point in time that he would assume office is currently unknown. This would be similar to Colorado not allowing someone on the Primary who was aged 34 years and 11 months because they are not currently qualified even though they would be qualified at the point that they serve. Maybe there is Colorado case law where they already do this which would be strange but I assume cases would be decided allowing a person of such age onto the Primary ballot. The age issue is a stronger argument because we know someone will age whereas Trump’s situation is unknown but I think it is a compelling argument.
benmmurphy
8mo ago
sam brinton must have read the alt-text on that comic
benmmurphy
1mo ago
ubiquitous TLS + ESNI/ECH does make it harder to perform some forms of censorship. for example if someone controlling the network wants to ban you from a particular site hosted on cloudflare or another CDN then they will need to ban ESNI/ECH connections to the whole of the CDN. more people using TLS/etc increases the collateral damage from certain blocking technologies.
The federal case against Trump seems to boil down to if you challenge an election then you have to be correct or you are going to jail. That doesn't seem to be a good precedent to set. He is being prosecuted for things that are entirely legal and people have done before in the past and have not been prosecuted for.
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