Dude, Techdirt is gold. They’re extremely sharp on issues of politics and law, they just do nerd stuff also.

I really tried to capture the unhinged emotional anger that is a key component but I don’t think I managed to do it. The muddled-ness of the jumping between different targets, and the hurt and anger that spurts out randomly from every word, are both a lot more important than any particular narrative element I think.

I think that would be a wonderful idea. There actually are places where as I understand it the public defender’s office is pretty good, with decent criminal attorneys who can really fight the case for you if there is something to work with, but that’s not consistent. Historically it was sometimes very bad. A lot of places it’s still pretty bad.

It’s also somewhat unrelated, but I think the era of putting a whole bunch of stuff on YouTube is a really good step. A lot of courtrooms just broadcast everything that happens onto a dedicated YouTube channel now, unless there is some reason not to, and it’s a really good thing. I think empowering people to show other people what happened, the actual nuts and bolts and how it went down in court, if there’s some fuckery, is giving a pretty strong disadvantage (in the long run) to the fuckery.

I saw one of these that was fucking harrowing. A woman got sexually assaulted, and the prosecutor had worked out a slap-on-the-wrist plea agreement for the guy without really consulting her even though they had said they would. She showed up for the sentencing and asked to speak before they went through with the plea agreement. That’s not really normal but the judge said fine. She explained all about how the prosecutor had lied to her, how they’d assured her that the guy would actually get punished and then just ghosted her, and called out the prosecutor for lying in court when he tried to argue back with her. She was furious. The judge rejected the plea agreement, yelled at the prosecutor, and they negotiated back to something that was still kind of bullshit (I think like 30 days in jail and some probation), but more than it had been. Which you could tell she was still absolutely enraged by. She argued with the judge, the judge kind of apologized but “you know look the prosecution are the ones that are going to fight the case, there’s only so much I can do.”

Anyway it was bullshit. But the point is, having it in public I think is definitely better than not. I think a lot of the fuckery that developed in the US criminal justice system is because the cops’ behavior on the street, and then the judgements happening inside the courtroom, were really only visible if you’re in some way involved in the system, so it’s hard for the community as a whole to really see what’s happening. IDK what the answer is but it does seem like reducing the massive money-dependence that the system has, and making it more transparent to people who aren’t either working for the system or immediately in the crosshairs, are two really important things.

Roughly 41% of this country thinks Biden was a pedophile and Trump is just trying to deport illegal aliens, but the gay Democrat mafia congress is trying to force him to keep them back in the country and the Supreme Court is in on it and they abort the babies after they’re born, they just put them on the table and ask the mother “well what do you want to do?” Do you think that’s okay? I can’t believe pronouns men boxing against women and they just beat the shit out of the women Willie Horton Hugo Chavez Dominion Voting they stole the election Hamas price of eggs “I did that!” antisemitism Hilary Clinton you know she killed that guy Alan Foster Michelle Obama is a man I just want to be an American is that so much to ask? Newsmax Tucker Carlson Zelensky got MILLIONS from the Nazis

I mean it was always thus. Back before it was “political” whether Venezuelans had any right to due process, it was “political” whether black people were people or property, or whether someone who was a socialist was allowed to run for president. It’s always been a little bit of a shit-show. We’re currently in an unusually shit-show time, but it’s not a new problem.

People are just assholes sometimes, which is why there’s so much mistrust built into the American system for the ones currently in charge of the operation.

Glad we had this talk then lol

I was careless in my phrasing. By saying “not breaking the rules,” I was meaning to encompass any kind of maliciousness in prosecution even if it is allowed under “the rules.” Which, in the current system, it often is, it would have been better for me to make that clear.

At risk of repeating back to you what you already know, your argument reads that the system is necessary, and I agree. Also, the system is unfair. I also agree.

Good so far.

Also that people who knowingly use the unfair system to hurt people unfairly caught in the system are not responsible for the unfairness. I disagree.

Nope! I actually completely agree with you on this. I touched on it a tiny bit up above, but to expand on it; Yes, absolutely, there are prosecutors who try at all costs to get a conviction even if they completely think the sentence is wildly harsh and punitive, or that the defendant is innocent or the law / system is wrong, or whatnot. Fuck those people. On that we actually 100% agree.

There are clearly prosecutors on the other side of that. We’re talking under a post where some prosecutors were asked to pervert the course of justice and they said “Nope fuck that we quit.” Prosecutors drop charges all the time because it seems like the charges are unwarranted. Often these kind of “trying to set right the wrongful conviction” stories include modern day prosecutors arguing super-strongly in favor of the defendant that their office convicted years before. That cop who broke the elderly Japanese man’s neck not long ago, the state prosecutor was the one that charged him with a felony. And so on.

I feel like we probably disagree quite a lot about how often the prosecutors are the bad type as opposed to the good type, and that’s why we view the whole system so differently. That’s all good, we can talk about it. That conversation might be enlightening for both of us.

See? Progress. Imagine if instead of just lobbing a baby-seal analogy at me when the exact same thing in a “just following orders” one hadn’t worked, repeating back to me things I’d already argued to you as if that was somehow productive, you’d started out by reading my argument and summarizing it back to me to see if you’d understood it completely, maybe asked questions about it, tried to have a conversation on that level. If you’d done that without me having to spend a bunch of messages being super condescending to you and forcing you into a corner where you had to do it, we could have saved some time.

What counterpoint did I raise to this argument when it was raised before?

I saw nothing that I observed as a counter-point.

Ah! We’ve reached the crux of the issue. You can search for the key word “blame” to observe, up above, you raising this exact point with a different analogy, and then me responding to it. See if that helps you find it. Let me know what you come up with.

No, as I said above, we are working on mutual communication, leading hopefully to us both learning more about the issue under discussion.

Honestly, I’m not trying to be rude about it, and I know I am a little bit, but it doesn’t sound that way to me. It seems like I’m communicating, and you’re repeating without paying much attention to what I’m saying except insofar as to try to detect things you can disagree with. That’s not really mutual communication.

Since “admitted” doesn’t work for you, what other word would you have me use?

It’s not actually the word choice. It’s you taking some area where we agree, and treating it as an “admission” by me of something you’re trying to prove to me, instead of, you know, just us seeing things the same way and then going forward from there.

Stop repeating to me things I’ve already said to you as if they’re going to be news to me. Stop treating it like when we agree, that’s me “admitting” something, instead of just me believing it and agreeing with you. Stop treating this as a lecture where you’re trying to get me to “admit” things. Just relax. Read what I wrote, try to understand it, and I’ll do the same for your stuff.

Go back and read what I already wrote, get some insight on what I think and why I think it. Once you can at least summarize back to me what my argument is, that’s mutual communication. It seems like you’re coming at this from a standpoint that I need to change my mind, you don’t, and what I have to say about it is not “the critical point” and just repeating your critical points at me.

Your point number two admits the issue, but then you end by saying that you can’t blame the seal-clubbers for clubbing seals.

What counterpoint did I raise to this argument when it was raised before?

Also, why would you bring up something that I’ve already “admitted” in your parlance and tell it to me? (I guess sharing a view with you is “admitting” something, since this needs to be an adversarial interaction and your point of view is presumed to be the “right” one that you’re trying to bring me around to).

What’s my point #2 say, up in the parent comment?

Why are you lecturing me? What’s my point #2 say up in the parent comment?

Yeah. That’s one of the big inequities built into the system. You basically have to have tons of resources for a good lawyer, and an ironclad way to prove your innocence, and also be willing to roll the dice that you won’t get fucked for life anyway just because you got unlucky in the trial. If you don’t have all three of those things, you’re fucked from the start even if you didn’t do anything.

It does occasionally happen that people get accused of a crime because they, in fact, committed a crime. Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Peter Navarro, Charles Manson, all those school shooters, the guy that broke into your car last year, drunk drivers, wife-beaters, a lot of people go through the court system because they in fact did do something wrong.

Without a system where a defense lawyer could argue vigorously to try to prove their innocence, no one who knowingly and deliberately got screwed for no good reason would have a chance to prove their innocence. Without someone on the other side trying to prove their guilt, it wouldn’t work either. Again, I do think there are huge injustices built in to our current “justice” system, I actually completely agree with you on that. I just think that prosecutors doing their job isn’t one of them.

I’m not sure. I can see it both ways. If you’ve ever worked in a place where a bunch of people in important roles quit, it fucks the place up usually in pretty significant ways.

Maybe the best of all the options is “stay on, agree to everything, but go full fascism-resistance-field-manual in trying to actively undermine everything that anyone tries to do.” IDK if that goes into the newspapers when it happens though.

Well, the system is that they go hard after convictions, and there’s a counterbalancing force on the other side that goes hard after acquittals. It’s not really a wrong system, it is the best design we’ve come up with. There are horrible inequities in how it gets applied, but it’s mostly a matter of (1) laws getting made in a way that perverts justice on behalf of the rich (2) the prosecution getting the full resources it needs to go hard in 100% of cases, and the defense only getting those resources if the client is wealthy and otherwise “lol good luck sucker.”

I don’t think you can blame the prosecutors for doing their jobs (assuming they’re not breaking the rules in how they do it) under that system.

There is a whole genre of smuggling that is literally just buying a bunch of watches or couple of high-end laptops or something and then throwing them in your suitcase and doing exactly this.

If you’re doing it with single items for personal use is it fine? Probably so, as long as you can avoid being extra stupid about it. Is it a good thing to get in the habit of? Oh mercy no.

Yeah, makes perfect sense, will do.

Matt Taibbi (before he went crazy) wrote some hilarious bits about sneaking all kinds of stuff into his articles when he was writing for smaller papers, and he said no one ever noticed. I was very saddened when he went over to the darkness for reasons I still don’t understand.

Yeah, makes sense. I just took it out from this post, want me to go back and do the same for earlier posts?

Sure, will do. I generally don’t like dodging around paywalls but The Atlantic for whatever weird reason puts full text of their stories into their RSS feed, so my habit was just to duplicate the story from the RSS feed.