magicalkittycat
No bio...
User ID: 3762
You have to go through a pretty substantial amount of double checking for a conviction.
The prosecutor to even charge you in the first place, then convincing a grand jury (about 16-23) which while typically very permissive especially with just a majority rule often aren't a rubber stamp, and then generally a judge for pretrial and then a trial jury of 12 who typically all have to agree, and while rare you can also get a JNOV and then you can often still appeal upwards multiple times if you feel that strongly about your case.
While wrongful convictions can and do happen, it's often due to a combination of bad luck and a case/evidence being really complex. It is not perfect, it will never be perfect without forfeiting many of the freedoms and privacies we have (a price most citizens do not wish to pay), but we try really hard to make sure only the criminals are punished.
Many of the founding fathers believed strongly that the courts must be trusted to punish the criminals and that the innocent must be safe. Such as this from John Adams, where he believed that a society where the innocent don't feel safe for their innocence breaks down the very rule of law, and they were determined to err on the side of caution to keep free society secure and stable.
The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world, that all of them cannot be punished; and many times they happen in such a manner, that it is not of much consequence to the public, whether they are punished or not. But when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, it is immaterial to me, whether I behave well or ill; for virtue itself, is no security. And if such a sentiment as this, should take place in the mind of the subject, there would be an end to all security what so ever.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
From what I've heard there was quite a few scandals regarding some of them. His administration didn't seem to do a good job either at being properly selective.
It is a shame that we have apparently elected multiple presidents in a row unable to match the general quality and care of prior admins, despite better technology and availability of information.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
Historically it was more equal with a bit of left leaning, but since Covid it has shifted hard right, especially with the rise of RFK and states like Florida reconsidering vaccine mandates.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
I don't understand what you're disputing here.
1/400 is the same rate as 2/800 and 3/1200 and the same as 10/4,000 and 100/40,000 and so on.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
Callous indifference continues to be an underrated descriptor complicating perception and reality of how much one side hates the other.
Only a small fraction want each other dead. Of those that do, only a tiny fraction would do anything to achieve those deaths. But there's a much larger fraction who are at best indifferent to deaths among The Other. Fine, to some extent that's signaling (of an extremely sick culture), but that still matters!
Most people not giving a shit is common, but also not particularly bad. Do you know anything about what is happening in Sudan or Myanmar or whatever else? I don't! The average American doesn't!
I don't even know what's happening in the next street over and frankly I don't really care that much if it doesn't impact me. I'm not gonna intervene if I overhear someone say "Oh did you know Joe on 123 next street over beats his wife sometimes?" I just want the police to show up and arrest Joe, but I ain't getting personally involved and I'm not blaming Joe's neighbors or coworkers for his actions.
Does that make me evil? If it does, it's an incredibly common very banal evil that basically everybody has about something.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
Woops sorry I didn't notice the usernames but same logic applies anyway.
If we trust Yougov for Poll 1, we should trust it for Poll 2. If we don't trust Poll 2, we shouldn't trust it for Poll 1.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
It’s definitely a dishonest comparison from you to compare the left’s rioting with the right’s, but fair to suggest that it should still nonetheless be disavowed as it definitely crossed a serious line.
How exactly is it dishonest? Assaulting police is a crime, whether you're right or left wing.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
The time for making such distinctions was when doing the prosecution in the first place.
They did! Do you have any evidence that someone was falsely charged and convicted of assaulting police that didn't assault police?
It is not reasonable to expect the President, having seen a great injustice done, to relitigate every case several years later to ensure only the correct amount of injustice is alleviated and not one bit of true justice undone.
Historically a lot of work is put into determining who does and doesn't get pardoned. This is an article detauling it in the 1980s with way less easy access to information and they still managed it.
If they could do it then, they could do it now. Or is the Trump admin, even with modern technology, still incapable of doing what presidents used to be able to do?
magicalkittycat
13d ago
J6 was a minor riot that killed no one, and during which police shot and killed an unarmed middle-aged woman. There's no math that makes this the equivalent of even one weekend of BLM, much less the entirety.
Is the only violence that matters to you death? Beating up a cop is still wrong, even if you don't kill them.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
You should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 40K participants to 16 million for the same reason you should not extrapolate 140 cops injured per 2.5k participant to 40K participants to get 2240 cop injuries.
"If we went up at the same rate" of 1:400 then yes it would equal that.
I agree with you that a larger crowd is likely to have less violence overall though, since size is likely to correlate hard with how many normies are joining in.
We can't compare apples to applies with real world events, because the real world is messy. But it doesn't need to be perfect to have some amount of usable information.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
Covid vaccine reluctance is hard coded right.
Even if the salt lake tribune is "one sided", the quote comes from.
Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill told The Tribune on Wednesday that his office had prosecuted Zinn, whose criminal history dates back to the ’80s, numerous times.
They have a lot of direct experience with this man, and it seems they've talked on numerous occasions. Unless you think the DA is just making it up out of thin air (and "no true conservative could ever do anything wrong ever" is not a rational argument). there's little reason to distrust it here.
No, we don't want each other dead. Most people are really peaceful, to the point that even in some of the most extreme times in history countries have to conscript and draft able bodied youth to fight for them because they won't do it willingly. Even in self defense like Ukraine, a country fighting for itself against an invading force is still something like 1 volunteer for every 3 drafted.
We have all sorts of phrases expressing a similar sentiment "bark is worse than their bite" "talk is cheap" "all talk and no action" "actions speak louder than words" "paper tiger" "keyboard warrior" etc. This sentiment is that people say things to sound tough and cool, but in reality the large large large majority won't ever actually do it.
It's basically all signaling, a person who says "Look at me support super controversial in-group aligned thing" signals how dedicated they are without ever actually having to do shit. It's just as believable as other bullshit like "I'd do anything for you" in a newly formed relationship. Also of course a great SSC piece on this type of thing
In the same way, publicizing how strongly you believe an accusation that is obviously true signals nothing. Even hard-core anti-feminists would believe a rape accusation that was caught on video. A moral action that can be taken just as well by an outgroup member as an ingroup member is crappy signaling and crappy identity politics. If you want to signal how strongly you believe in taking victims seriously, you talk about it in the context of the least credible case you can find.
Publicizing how we're all basically the same and peaceful doesn't signal too much. Publicizing the hate you have for out-group and how you support the Thing Others Won't Support is lots of loyalty signal.
..
I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defense as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.
Also of course, a bit of Moloch
Under Moloch, everyone is irresistibly incentivized to ignore the things that unite us in favor of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive. Race relations are at historic lows not because white people and black people disagree on very much, but because the media absolutely worked its tuchus off to find the single issue that white people and black people disagreed over the most and ensure that it was the only issue anybody would talk about. Men’s rights activists and feminists hate each other not because there’s a huge divide in how people of different genders think, but because only the most extreme examples of either side will ever gain traction, and those only when they are framed as attacks on the other side.
People talk about the shift from old print-based journalism to the new world of social media and the sites adapted to serve it. These are fast, responsive, and only just beginning to discover the power of controversy. They are memetic evolution shot into hyperdrive, and the omega point is a well-tuned machine optimized to search the world for the most controversial and counterproductive issues, then make sure no one can talk about anything else. An engine that creates money by burning the few remaining shreds of cooperation, bipartisanship and social trust.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
Sure, so let's just look at your own Yougov link (which presumably you trust as a fair source since you used it) which says
But YouGov has asked this question multiple times since 2022, and found some noticeable changes in opinion. For one thing, while Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say political violence is a very big problem in September 2025, in the wake of Kirk's shooting, the reverse has been true when YouGov has asked this question after attacks on Democratic political figures. How concerned Americans are about political violence is related to some degree to whether someone from their side or from the other side is the most recent to be attacked
Yeah this seems to support that it's mostly signaling "I support my side!" or "I'm upset!" rather than consistent views.
He was not forced to do a blanket clemency that covered violent crimes. The campaign even said before election that violent criminals would not be released.
“If you protested peacefully on Jan. 6 and you’ve had [Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” Vance told “Fox News Sunday.”
He added, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
Even Vance agreed it's obvious that violent criminals should not be sent into the general public. Yet what happened? Cop beaters with long rap sheets were freed.
Some of them have been rearrested for other charges like plotting an assassination against the FBI as revenge, existing charges of soliciting a minor, child pornography, etc.
As one would expect, cop beaters are not good people. Pardoning minor crimes like trespassing makes sense, in the chaos maybe many people didn't hear or notice the warnings. But why pardon cop beaters? They have made it known they are violent individuals, else they wouldn't have attacked a cop.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
I’m so confused because none of the violence referenced in your links was at all observable on any of the livestreams.
A lot of it is done in the messier busier crowds where seeing what's going on is difficult. But yes we have videos like this and this.
Interesting, we also have video of a current DOJ official yelling to kill the cops
It almost seems to have appeared post-hoc. Do you have any video evidence of any of this? It seems near certain that there would have been given how much was filmed.
So yes we do, and if you want more you can just Google for the rest. Videos + police testimony makes for a strong case, cops don't generally lie about being attacked.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
If we were to have millions of right-leaning Americans protest on a level similar to that of the BLM riots, how much more violence would we see? I acknowledge the number of police injuries would go up just due to statistics.
If we went up at the same rate at roughly 140 cops injured per 40k participants, we would have about 56,000 cop injuries at a 16 million participant Jan 6th. You're correct they aren't perfect comparisons, but real world data hardly is.
- But I think the current right-wing response to Kirk's assassination is pretty telling. We aren't seeing cities being burned and looted to anything remotely close to the BLM riots after Floyd's death.
The relatively high rates of violence of Jan 6th and BLM, and low rates of any protest nowadays both left (no kings march) and right (now) suggest that the violence was more a product of its time than anything else. A lot of things were weird during 2020 and 2021 from the lockdowns and spastic economy of the time.
Decent chance like a lot of datasets, the 2020-2022 data is just a distortion.
Polling people immediately after just reveals signaling, it doesn't reveal beliefs. And as always, wording matters.
For example if you say
“true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country”,
It's 30% of Republicans and only about 12% of Democrats. https://prri.org/research/threats-to-american-democracy-ahead-of-an-unprecedented-presidential-election/
In our latest survey, Republicans (18%) are more likely to agree that political violence may be necessary to save our country than independents (13%) and Democrats (11%). Independents’ views on this measure have been consistent since March 2021. Support for political violence among Republicans peaked at a high of 35% in August 2021, though most recently, since Trump’s election, their support has been at its lowest (18%). Democrats’ support for political violence has remained consistently lower during this period, ranging from a low of 7% to a high of 13%.
Now of course as always, beware the man of one study, beware the man of the polls (especially online polls) too.
Timing, wording, polling sample biases, all of these can lead to drastic differences. Polling is signaling, it's obvious that 35% of Republicans didn't actually support political violence during 2021 (given not even a fraction of a fraction did any violence), they just said it to signal "I'm really upset right now!".
magicalkittycat
13d ago
think more detail would be needed to conclude it is far right instead of the identical far left conspiracy theories.
Pizzagate, Qanon, 2020 election, Russiagate, those are all pretty right wing.
Currently the left is the one banging the drum about government connection to sexual abuse of children.
Even Epstein was a right wing leaning thing (at least bipartisan) and still is decently bipartisan. The only reason it's become a "left" thing now is the Trump admin's sudden pivot away from releasing the files as promised multiple times during campaign.
It only stopped being a right thing because they haven't released the list they said they would.
magicalkittycat
13d ago
That would make it what, 147th on the list of most violent/destructive protests in the past twenty years? Like I said, very minor.
If has about a 1 in 400 cop injury ratio seems pretty high, especially when it's significantly higher than even BLM (something else often called violent) and their cop injury ratio.
I agree with you, most participants are still peaceful. Most of any group are peaceful. And all those peaceful individuals deserve to be judged for their peace, not the behavior of criminal scum.
But relatively, yeah it was pretty high in the rate of criminal scum.
Something that's getting frustrating to me around the discussion of Charlie Kirk's assassination (man it feels weird to say that) is that conservatives are being told to eat the Paul Pelosi attack as a right wing thing.
But the attacker (David Depape), was, if he was even capable of holding any sort of political position at all, not even remotely right wing, at least not in any way that any right winger would identify as a bedfellow.
His own defence attorney literally said it was because he passionately believed in far right theories. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67372363
During opening arguments on Thursday, Mr DePape's defence conceded that their client attacked Mr Pelosi in his quest to find the California congresswoman.
But they said his interest in Mrs Pelosi was not due to her political status.
"The reason he acted had nothing to do with Nancy Pelosi [and her] official duties as a member of Congress," defence attorney Jodi Linker told the court.
Instead, Ms Linker said he was driven by right-wing conspiracies that blame the country's demise on corrupt elites who use their status to spread lies, including facilitating the sexual abuse of children.
"Members of the jury, many of us do not believe any of that," Ms Linker said. "But the evidence in this trial will show that Mr DePape believes all these things… with every ounce of his being."
They said this to fight charges against kidnapping a federal official (which requires it to be directly because of her official duties as a member of Congress and not outside motivations such as those far right theories). The goal was to present him as a crazy nutjob who took Qanon, 2020 being stolen, and other far right ideas spread online seriously rather than a targeted attack triggered by any official action.
He himself testified to this
The man on trial for the bludgeoning of Paul Pelosi admitted in testimony Tuesday that he struck him with a hammer during a botched attempt to kidnap his wife, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for “lying about Russia-gate.”
David DePape, 43, told a jury that he planned to dress up in a unicorn costume and record a video of the top Democrat in Congress as he interrogated her about what he saw as her false statements about ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
What better evidence could there be than him and his defense literally saying it?
I'm also getting sick of hearing that the right wing is supposed to eat January 6th. We've had every single right wing politician "disavowing" this for the last 5 years, despite the fact that the only person killed on this day was a right wing woman.
If it was disavowed, why did people who stabbed, tasered, threw bombs at, or otherwise attacked cops get pardoned? The idea that only murder is violence (and she herself was shot at by a cop as she refused to listen to a lawful order and continued illegal behavior so I guess you're saying police brutality is more of an issue than violence against police is) seems weak. All of those things are violence!
In fact here's something interesting, I asked chatgpt to run some numbers. "Per participant, was Jan 6th or BLM more violent towards cops?"
Police injuries on Jan 6th, 2021 About 2,000–2,500 rioters entered the Capitol complex.
140+ police officers (Capitol Police + D.C. Metro Police) reported physical injuries (sprains, burns, concussions, eye damage, broken bones, etc.).
That means 5–7% of participants injured an officer, or 1 injury for every 15–20 rioters.
Police injuries during 2020 BLM-related unrest Over the course of summer 2020 protests, an estimated 15–26 million Americans participated.
Nationwide, various agencies reported 2,000 law enforcement officers injured during the protests/riots (mostly in the first two weeks after George Floyd’s killing).
That’s 0.01% of participants injuring an officer, or 1 injury for every 7,500–13,000 protesters.
Comparison (per participant) Jan 6th: 1 in 20 participants caused a police injury.
BLM protests: 1 in several thousand participants caused a police injury.
👉 Conclusion: On a per-participant basis, Jan 6th was vastly more violent toward police officers — by orders of magnitude.
Of course it doesn't matter, at the end of the day everyone is an individual and should be judged as an individual. Whether you attended BLM or Jan 6th, if you didn't assault a cop then you don't deserve blame for it. But it is quite interesting to see. Even if we change it to say, 40,000 (a medium estimate of the total Jan 6th protestors and not just those who entered the capitol), it's still about 1 in 400 or so.
Edit: You know there's also an interesting thing to consider in right vs left violence discussions. The gender gap!
Men make up 80% of violent crimes (and some specific ones like mass shootings like 97%). Thus statistically a group composed of men should have more violent people than an equal sized group of women. And violence is typically a thing done most by youth, so the group with younger men should presumably have more than the group with younger women.
Combine this with
Americans under the age of 30 voted for Harris by 4 points (50 percent Harris – 46 percent Trump), though young men and women diverged dramatically, with men under 30 voting for Trump by 16 points (41 percent Harris – 57 percent Trump), and women under 30 voting for Harris by 24 points (59 percent Harris – 35 percent Trump).
And it would make sense if right wing violence was a bit more common, just because it has more men.
magicalkittycat
14d ago
Why do you demand I stand and put my best foot forward when you dismiss the fact that your own arguments are not convincing?
Do you believe your general attitude of insults presents as a person operating in good faith with an open mind to change? All you've done this entire time is to continue the "feels > reals" discourse rather than actually cite any numbers, statistics, or information.
You really come off like you care less about dead kids than you do about the opportunity they provide as a distraction. If that weren't the case, you'd bring them up in contexts besides the death of Charlie Kirk.
By contrast, the reason people are talking about Charlie Kirk is because they actually do care about his death. This reflects poorly on you, and only adds fuel to the fire.
Hmm, does this mean you don't care about kids dying if you haven't made a thread on it? I hope you hold yourself to the standard of "no thread = no care" you hold me to.
- I am absolutely certain you think Charlie's death is a good thing, and your only concern is that anyone disagrees.
You're absolutely certain how? Because you made it up in your head and therefore it's real?
From the spamming of conservative slogans I have never said in my life
Why would it matter if you said it or not? The truth remains facts don't care about your feelings and facts don't care to be politically correct.
you make yourself impossible to be kind to, and I am normally very patient.
I've met plenty of patient people before and none of them have became angry because of a commonly used slogan. You're an interesting outlier.
the rest of the violence was very minor for a riot.
Tell that to the 140+ cops who got injured https://www.policemag.com/patrol/news/15310988/140-officers-were-injured-in-capitol-riot-officials-say
Including
One officer has two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal discs and another was stabbed with a metal fence stake
One was beaten and tased until he passed out and another was attacking cops with a metal whip
After being pulled from the line of officers, Fanone was then beaten by rioters during one of the most brutal assaults on police protecting the Capitol that day. He was tased in the neck and eventually lost consciousness during the attack, where he had begged rioters for his life and told them he had children.
...
Andrew Taake of Texas pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers with bear spray and a "metal whip" on Jan. 6 and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Another threw a bomb at a group of cops.
There was also multiple pipe bombs planted by an unfound individual yet
Another hit cops with a baton he brought, and threw a speaker box at them
These are just a portion of the violence by Jan 6th protestors. And the property damage too, windows were smashed, offices were trashed and damaged and things were stolen off desks.
Total cost estimated around 2.7 billion dollars
Now of course, these criminals are just a small portion of the Jan 6th protest. There were tens of thousands of people there, many of whom were completely peaceful and not engaged in destructive behavior. Those people do not deserve blame for the actions of criminals just for existing in the same place together. Like members of any loosely formed group, people should be held individually responsible.
But that doesn't mean the criminals don't exist either. They do, and they were very violent and destructive. Both can be true, criminals exist and other protestors who didn't do crime aren't responsible for it.
magicalkittycat
14d ago
He also DMed me
You are a terrible person and your comments suck
So he read it enough to get really upset. Ironic, it evidences the argument that it's feelings based and not facts based.
Less serious, sure. But actrocity math is not a great game to be playing. How many assaults are equal to a murder? How many thefts to equal a rape?
I don't think it particularly matters, they can all be bad things deserving of punishment. It can be interesting to compare, but that's where it ends.
You're absolutely right. It doesn't matter if it's murder or assault or whatever, they should have gone to jail for it if it can be proven in court, and they should properly serve their time.
Btw do you know what happened with all the violent criminals who attacked cops, damaged buildings or stole government property during Jan 6th?
And any individual who did those crimes and can be proven so properly deserves to be punished for it, just like any individual doing crime at any other time anywhere else in the country.
The US is a proud individualist country, with a long history believing in the idea of personal responsibility. As Ronald Reagan put it himself
More options
Context Copy link