fectin wrote:That's only if they were within the warrant though, yes? IIRC, it happened to work out that aside from being terribad, that whole thing was done in a way which was technically outside their warrant.
Also, how does a "color of law" suit play into that (if at all)? I don't understand those real well.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly given police broad warrantless search powers every time a case about warrants and searches come up, so you can basically assume that the Fourth Amendment about illegal searches doesn't exist except in very specific cases.
Suing the government is crazy hard and basically never works ... even in cases where an actual conspiracy of law-breaking is proved.
That being said, suing for damages is based on the principle that it is in your best interests to settle for an amount that is less than the amount of defending the case. This means that any case that survives a Motion for Summary Judgement, meaning that the case is not open-and-shut, can net you some payout.
Since the police were generally trying to follow the law here (broad though those laws may be), this case doesn't look like it can survive a MSJ.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
No, they shouldn't, but even given supreme executive power to rewrite all laws anywhere at-will, I don't know how you could fix it. Sure, you could keep a few fingers in the dyke until your death, but how can you possibly create a regulatory body to regulate another regulatory body without running into the exact same problems all over again?
Both? I mean, the internet has been wonderful, but .... TRIGGERS rape.
So in the last week in NZ, it's turned out there was a facebook page for a gang rape club here. Not exactly subtle, names and dates and victim naming, blaming, shaming, and basically strait up admitting to multiple counts of stupefying minors and raping them while barely conscious.
For two years.
During which time the police were "monitoring the situation."
One of the guys involved is the son of a senior police officer. Another is the son of a local celebrity figure.
It gets worse. The police immediately claimed they couldn't do anything because no one would lay a complaint. Lawyers insist that's not relevant to the laws in question. Police then admit people did actually complain (after those girls went to the press), they just weren't "formal complaints". Again, lawyers note that's not the point. Police later still admit there totally was formal complaints, they just didn't want to press charges, or take the page down, or anything.
One of the complainants who came forward, was 13 at the time, to note that her police interview involved policemen telling here she was dressed provocatively, and wilfully drank alcohol, and might have fancied one of the guys a bit anyway, and telling her not to waste her time laying any complaints because no one would believe her, and what did she expect anyway. She, at least, tried to get charges pressed and was refused.
Lawyers again point out, none of that is relevant to NZ law. She's under 16, so stupefying her is a crime, having sex with her is a crime, and so on. Consent isn't even an issue.
So someone puts up a bit of a retarded joke about the police not really caring about rape complaints, and within hours the police are threatening him with six months in prison for misusing their name. Which went all Streisand on them and they couldn't quite threaten people fast enough to keep it down. Now it's on reddit and stuff.
Again, lawyers pointing out the police are wrong. Priorities, eh. They do not have them strait.
Politicians have been falling over themselves to apologise for misleading the house after repeating what the police told them two days previous, multiple times. The minister of police is ... finally noticing something might be amiss here. Which is in itself a bit of a miracle because she loves the police.
So government is calling an inquiry. Which will take a year, and will be the 5th inquiry in recent years into the police culture of not wanting to prosecute rape, blaming victims, having actual gang-raping policemen in charge of taking rape complaints, and so on. The reports about those reports note that the police have not implemented any of the recommendations from past inquiries (other than to sack, but not charge, the actual rapists), so more of the same will obviously not help.
Our Prime Minister, when asked, said the real problem was the boys just needed to grow up a bit. I'm sort of thinking the real problem might just be the rape culture, all the way to the top.
More info? Google "Roast Busters". I am too fucking disgusted to go there again. After a week of intense media interest, the police are finally seeking warrants for the facebook data. The young men in question are now unemployed, on account of their faces being on the national news every night, but the police are ... really just being obstructive, still.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
It's oddly comforting to know, that the legal system is shit in all the countries.
In USA, prosecutor Ken Houston, who hid the evidence that resulted in innocent man spending 25 years in prison, was arested. For ten days. For disrespecting the court. Yay.
Yesterday, Vasyl Virastyuk, the strongest man on the planet, accidentally disperesed gay parade in Lvov, Ukraine. He was walking to the dentist, with a very angry facial expression, which scared the shit out of protesters and forced them to flee. Vasyl later claimed, that he didn't even noticed the parade.
Last edited by Longes on Mon Nov 11, 2013 8:54 am, edited 3 times in total.
And bizzare news:
An "artist" from Saint Petersburge nailed his testicles to the boulders of the Red Square and was sitting there naked, until the police didn't stop that. According to the "artist", naked man watching his nailed balls in front of the governement is supposed to symbolize the apathy of people.
This isn't his first "art installment". One of the previous bursts of creativity was him lying wrapped in barbed wire in front of the police building.
Last edited by Longes on Mon Nov 11, 2013 9:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
To be fair, if I saw someone nailing their testicles to a boulder, I would go out of my way to avoid them. Someone capable of doing that is capable of anything.
One of his other "expressions" was sewing his own mouth with thread, as a way to show support of Pussy Riot (and his opinion about freedom of speech in Russia). Notably, he's been sent to psychiatric check-up, and has been deemed perfectly sane.
If you are using it in the privacy of your own home, it's a personal masturbator. If you are lining up at the local robobrothel for it, it's a commercial masturbator. The only way it'd be an industrial masturbator is if... I don't know, unions declare robohandies for everyone during lunchbreaks?
Religion seems like a particularly bad justification for social interaction, seeing as you keep believing all the stupid, shitty, obviously and transparently wrong things even when there are no other people around.
If you are using it in the privacy of your own home, it's a personal masturbator. If you are lining up at the local robobrothel for it, it's a commercial masturbator. The only way it'd be an industrial masturbator is if... I don't know, unions declare robohandies for everyone during lunchbreaks?
If a sperm bank uses it, then it becomes an industrial masturbator.
Religion seems like a particularly bad justification for social interaction, seeing as you keep believing all the stupid, shitty, obviously and transparently wrong things even when there are no other people around.
You've got to remember that the Evangelical religions are pretty much aggressive mind viruses that take advantage of weaknesses in human psychology to replicate themselves. They've managed to displace the much less virulent religions that were pretty much just trying to explain the universe in a pre-scientific society (and also be an excuse for orgies).
An acquaintance of mine is deeply religious and recently his 5 year old was diagnosed with Leukemia. The majority of his posts (and the comments on those posts) have fallen into two categories:
1) How horrible it is that such a young innocent child could be stricken with such a terrible disease.
2) Prayers to God that his son will get better / Praise to God each time his son makes progress.
(without intending to bring politics into the non-politics thread, he's also spent the last three years being mean and snarky about Obama in general, and Obamacare in particular, and now completely unironically has made a begging page asking for twenty thousand dollars in "donations" to pay for his son's cancer treatment)
Objectively that is absolutely bonkers. How is God in control of his son's recovery, but not in control of his son getting sick in the first place?
But it makes complete sense if you view him as being infected by a mind virus that causes massive cognitive dissonance, and has infected his social circles so strongly that social status is literally tied to how "godly" he is.
Last edited by Sashi on Thu Nov 14, 2013 5:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cynic wrote:I guess Komrad Putin wants everyone to be fit like him.
Jumping over the railing is still easier
Sashi wrote:But it makes complete sense if you view him as being infected by a mind virus that causes massive cognitive dissonance, and has infected his social circles so strongly that social status is literally tied to how "godly" he is.
Good job quoting Dawkins, but he makes words like "mind virus" to intensify the scare. It makes perfect sense in context of people routinely using doublethink to avoid things they don't like. You see people ignoring bits and pieces of their religion all the time - no one locks menstruating women, no one stones unruly children to death, no one sells their wifes to a pharaoh as a part of intricate con.
This isn't limited to religion. 1/3 of russians want monarchy to return. British love their queen to death. Abused women return to their abusive partners.
People take the best parts of X and ignore the worst all the time.
Sashi wrote:Objectively that is absolutely bonkers. How is God in control of his son's recovery, but not in control of his son getting sick in the first place?
Lay people don't really believe in omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence. You have to be heard by God, and then God has to spare some power for you from his limited but renewable pool.
Last edited by Starmaker on Thu Nov 14, 2013 10:19 am, edited 2 times in total.
Sashi wrote:Objectively that is absolutely bonkers. How is God in control of his son's recovery, but not in control of his son getting sick in the first place?
Also, why does God need the person to raise twenty grand to fix the problem? It's almost like they don't think God will do it on his own, and that they need to step in and help somehow...
Starmaker wrote:
Lay people don't really believe in omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence. You have to be heard by God, and then God has to spare some power for you from his limited but renewable pool.
Yes and no. A lot of lay people will say they believe in those things in casual discussion. If you press the issue (and they don't refuse to discuss it), some of them will admit that omniscience/omnipotence are more of an approximation, but a large number of them will still insist that those three qualities do not logically preclude each other or even themselves.
I can't count the number of times I've heard people call God "omnibenevolent", only to have them then describe a being that is anything but. God frequently gets special pleading exceptions in regard to moral judgments. In the end, "omnibenevolent" seems to be more of a title rather than a useful, descriptive adjective.
Sashi wrote:Objectively that is absolutely bonkers. How is God in control of his son's recovery, but not in control of his son getting sick in the first place?
Lay people don't really believe in omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence. You have to be heard by God, and then God has to spare some power for you from his limited but renewable pool.
that's the way people's brains actually work, but again, a huge amount of his social capital is invested in affirming very fundamentalist Christian ideas (such as omniscience).
And now that I think about it, a lot of his posts are actually religious philosophizing about how his interpretation of the Bible is "correct" and that people who only believe the parts of the Bible that make them feel good are fake Christians.
That's some real dedication to cognitive dissonance.
When I clicked to unspoil, I had mostly scrolled down the page. So I saw the image down as far as his hand and the rod. It looked like Jesus had a massive hard-on for our suffering.
Which is possibly the greatest thing ever.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
Saw a clip with Dawkins a while back where he noted that people pick up religion when they're young and extremely credulous (because not believing your parents when they told you about the red berries and yellow wasps and howling wolves, even before you'd seen any of those things, was bad for your prospects). Then, as people slowly get smarter and better at arguing, it's very easy for them to come up with ever more sophisticated arguments for believing in whatever kept their parents alive, or just whatever random bullshit that sounds like a safety message.
So you end up with highly educated people making brilliant logical contortions to defend obviously stupid ideas, and less educated people making fairly obvious ones. But if you point out why their argument is wrong, they'll just find a better one.
People get totally lost in that. Strokes are from God, and God is good, so strokes are good. Every moment you feel sad about a stroke is your personal failure to appreciate God's love. The bankruptcies showed you how resilient you were. The alcoholism let you find your way back to God. Murdering your wife in a drunken fit of failure-rage, that let her get to heaven earlier, which is lovely. But don't touch your penis, because God is watching and he hates that shit. You'll go blind. Or something. Boils. Rain of frogs. Infinite love. Seeing contradictions is just your failure to appreciate that.
EDIT NOTE: People also get caught up during times of existential crisis, and leaving for them is worse because it threatens more of the same.
Last edited by tussock on Fri Nov 15, 2013 10:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
