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Notes -
Palin v. The New York Times... still
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals holds:
For those unfamiliar with the background, in reaction to the 2011 Tucson Shooting of Representative Giffords and several others, the New York Times, among many other media, tried to tie then-relevant once-Vice-Presidential candidate to the shooter. Like all those other media, the proposed connections the Times gave were entirely imagined: the shooter was a paranoid schizophrenic that had become obsessed with Giffords by August 2007, before Palin had been offered the Republican Vice Presidential candidacy, and before any of the proposed 'incitement', and there was never any evidence that the shooter had even seen any of Palin's supposed 'incitement'.
However, the Times slipped particularly aggressively: it revisited the claim years after it was obviously false in the piece America's Lethal Politics in 2017, arguing that the link to Palin's political incitement was extremely clear, unlike the then-current Congressional Baseball shooting. Not only would anyone remotely familiar with the case know that was false, claims in the piece America's Lethal Politics were in direct contradiction with the link used to support those claims, and/or with other claims in the same paper, or other sites under the Times umbrella. While these were corrected eventually in the most dismissive manner possible, the organization never actually apologized to Palin or made clear that the statements about Palin specifically were false: even the current piece just sputters off a correction that never mentions her name and a main piece that now merely points and winks when it says "... in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established".
In 2017, Palin brought a lawsuit for defamation. This Did Not Go Well. The district court first held that Palin would have to prove impossible claims and dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice. After an appeals court overturned that dismissal, New York State 'refined' its law so that defamation lawsuits became harder and more financially risky to bring; the trial court held this applied retroactively. The same district court then had an actual trial, where the same judge refused to allow a wide variety of relevant information in as evidence, required again that Palin prove a novel and impossible standard -- that the Times' editor not only knew the claim was false, but that it was defamatory -- and eventually dismissed the case while the jury were deliberating. Some number of the jurors received phone notifications of that dismissal while they were deliberating.
As a result, the appeals court has ordered Mrs. Palin a new trial.
It's... not clear how much this is gonna matter, though. Yes, Palin can demonstrate that the New York Times knew or should have known that the claims were false, and that being accused of inciting a assassin-turned-child-murderer is defamatory, while the defense is stuck with "owo, we fowgot". And yes, that's the traditional understanding of what it takes to defame even a public figure. But that's not what actually wins a court case, and when it comes to the things that do:
That is, all Palin must do is prove to twelve jurors the contents of a New York Times editors brain the better part of a decade ago, in a jurisdiction where the state has already retroactively changed statutes to make this trial harder, in front of a judge that has repeatedly made errors going on direction, while the defendant openly misleads the court, with the bare minimum opportunity to reduce bias on the part of jurors selected from part of the country heavily opposed to Palin. That trial -- maybe happening in mid-2025 -- in the exceptionally unlikely chance Palin and her legal team do win, will still do nearly bupkiss in actually making anyone whole or seriously discouraging the Times from making shit up; given reporting on the earlier 'victory' for the Times, it probably won't even persuade anyone not already certain of it that the Times was making shit up.
There's a lot of fun comparisons, of better and worse validity, to other recent defamation lawsuits, but I think they're a bit of a distraction. I tell that story so I can tell this one:
Trump v. Hostages
Big, if true! There's long been rumors about Reagan delaying recuse of hostages from Iran or Nixon sinking Vietnam-era peace talks, although they tend to end up just shy of conspiracy theory only because Dem cranks don't count. Someone like Trump doing it, in the middle of a war with tens of thousands of casualties and over a hundred
corpseshostages, some American? With people willing to give first-hand knowledge of it?And then the other shoe drops:
That post reads, in full:
There's a bit of a missing note, here: the problem isn't just that the Trump or Netanhayhu offices denied it -- they would, after all -- it's that she made it up, herself. Neither the original Axios or Reuters articles even imply that Trump has encouraged Netanyahu or other Israeli politicians to delay any deals of any kind. Indeed the Axios story managed to say the exact opposite:
Woodruff will, of course, suffer absolutely zero for making up a fat fib in the middle of a major media discussion on national news. But don't worry, we have really strong true-finding tools, right? Oh, no, they just need people to prove a negative or 'unproven' is all we get. Hope that won't be a problem!
Attempted Assassins v. FBI
Which is kinda fascinating, given that the FBI sent out a wide variety of Emergency Disclosure Requests for accounts supposedly tied to the shooter, including a Gab account tied to the man was filled with progressive-aligned trolling, which the FBI lumped into the "the general absence of other information to date from social media". It'd be fascinating to know if that means that the FBI believes this Gab account wasn't the shooter's at all, or if anyone else with other accounts tied to him got EDR'd.
Too bad! And we're not gonna find out.
The FBI also released some photos of the shooter's gear; those that remember early testimony by the FBI about a 'collapsible' stock making it hard to notice while the shooter was walking on the ground can now know (again) that FBI Directory Wray is a moron.
Trump v. Arlington National Cemetery
On Monday, Donald Trump visited the Arlington National Cemetery with a number of 'Gold Star' families, close relatives of those who died in service to the United States military, in this case the Abbey Gate bombing during the Afghanistan withdrawal. To borrow from Douglas Adams, this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
I'm not a particular fan of using gravestones as political props, in a lot of the same ways that I'm not a huge fan of parents dressing their kids up as political props, and because Trump, this manages to be DARE-level incompetence at doing it, too. On the other hand, I'm also stuck in this world, where politicians taking media from military cemeteries for political ads has both long been tolerated and long been ugly and partisan, without it becoming a national news story or involving physical confrontations that get reported to police. Trying to track down the actual authority or past enforcement for the rule ends up finding 'something something Hatch act', which is just shy of Logan Act for a red flag for incoming inconsistent application.
Now, I don't particularly trust DailyCaller reporting.
But it'd be real nice to have a way to tell. Too bad!
re: the palin thing i think everyone should have free reign to defame politicians. if you are a politician then this is just a negative you need to suck up. i think the alternative that courts are adjudicating the line between free speech and defamation around politicians is much worse. i strongly suspect courts are just going to push the thumb on the scale to protect 'good' politicians and harm 'bad' politicians.
We already have a problem with smart, sane people staying the hell away from politics -- this would make it worse.
You are trying to remake politics in the image of academia. That won't work. Politics is a much more important and foundational human institution than academia. What is needed here are hustlers and grifters, the Saul Goodman types, not scientists or engineers.
I'm not trying to do anything of the kind, I'm well aware of issues with academia.
I have some experience with local politics and I'm telling you one of the biggest challenges is getting good people to run. Anyone who is remotely sane or competent wants nothing to do with politics.
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Academia has too much fraudsters it self. What we need is less people like that anywhere, especially in important fields while still be wise to their tricks. So maybe a few reformed ones to catch the unreformed ones.
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