Yes, if you are certain that complying with discovery is going to expose more crimes and get you and your seditious buddies in more hot water, a good soldier like Giuliani will take the L of a default judgement, simply because he’s more afraid of what his “friends” will do to him than what the justice system will do to him.
It’s not easy to lose a case by default for failing to comply with discovery. You have to really work hard for the court to basically say “your conduct is so bad that you’ve forfeited your right to continue making a defense”. But due process is still a process, and if you straight up refuse to fulfill your end of the process, and turn down the many chances to comply with discovery that the judge will give you, then this happens. Alex Jones went down for the same thing in his defamation case. These turds all think they can just buck every system or break any norm that suits them, which is why they always go down for the dumbest simplest shit in these cases like perjury, discovery, and witness tampering.
deleted by creator
two groups of people working in the same branch of government having a meeting does sound pretty bad tbh, should probably have Jim Jordan get on that.
I agree that self harm is a tragic response to the kind of environment she was apparently in. I do not agree that this act somehow makes her “perception of the world” (whatever that very broad phrase might mean) unreasonable, or that it proves she has an “extreme personality” (again not sure what, definitionally, that is). I think perfectly normal people react in unexpected ways to extreme environments and unless you have some reason to assume to otherwise I’m not sure it’s reasonable to look at self harm and then default to questioning the person first and not the situation first.
I think this is the right take. Americans have Section 230 (for now) that quite broadly protects communications platforms from liability over what 3rd parties (users) post to their platform about Piracy. We also have the 1st Amendment which more or less protects anything you say short of direct, specific calls to commit crimes and some types of slander/libel. It’s why we can say goofy shit like “now I’m not saying you should do this or encouraging anyone to do this, but if you were going to anyway here’s how:…” and get away with it.
In the EU, not so much. They have “methods and means” rules that can get platform owners in trouble for 3rd parties just posting about BitTorrent clients or providing advice like “Google X if you want to find Y” on their platform if it’s smells of possible piracy. We’re so used in the US to just being able to disclaim everything we say that this is a bit shocking. But talking about tools and techniques, even if you preamble with “now don’t ever use these for piracy bros, ok, I don’t advocate for using this advice in that way” is not going to save the user or even the platform owners from trouble. It is not just about posting direct links to pirated content or hosting/torrent sites. Maybe a point that is little-understood in the threads I’ve been reading on here about this.
It’s almost like our made-up borders and laws are somehow at odds with the fact that, in almost all cases, anyone can access any information from any place these days, and that information is replicated and stored across the globe!
I wish other people were making this point as well. Certain content is illegal various places around the world, and I don’t think anyone is saying we want the admins to risk that, but entire communities are - at worst - slightly more prone than others to having users post illegal content. If I post illegal content anywhere, sure, go ahead and remove/ban. But removing discussion of entire topics, just because those communities* might* be places where people might be a little more likely try and post such content, just isn’t making sense to me. Isn’t it the content, not the name of the channel, that’s the issue, or am I missing something?
Point well taken, but I’d say getting the US Congress to agree to things that inconvenience the rich might be an exception. I really wish we could get the ball rolling on that in a self-sustaining, self-amplifying way that compounded to larger and larger changes and more and more public support. But that just isn’t how my government has worked in my lifetime in my experience.
I’m all for taxing and regulating the hell out of these totally unneeded luxuries, but air travel is 2% of global emissions, and private jets are 2% of that. They are a pure luxury, and so are a good target for emissions reduction, but this would be just one of hundreds of similarly-sized initiatives needed to move the needle at this point. It’s also not a “soft target” since we’d have to take something away from the rich that they like, which costs a lot of time and political capital that then can’t be used elsewhere, perhaps to greater impact.
Yes, they certainly have to meet requirements for air exchange. And if you define “airtightness” as that, then yes, the ones that met that definition met that definition. What they are not is the common definition of airtightness, as in a sealed glass jar, steel can, scuba tank, or submarine, which if you look at the comments here was what was confusing a lot of people. I don’t think anyone was contending that there aren’t tests that these houses have to pass, just that the word airtightness, as understood by laypeople, isn’t an accurate term to describe these homes.
They aren’t “airtight”, that would awful. They are well-insulated and designed to take advantage of passive solar heating and air exchange cooling. The way roofs and windows and orientation on the land is usually done for western homes is just terribly inefficient for capturing and releasing heat in the right ways. Just some thick walls, a bank of windows facing the sunrise ,and some proper roof vents that can be opened when it’s hot is all most passive houses really are.
Yeah, it’s much more like a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” thing than a trap. Or a “backed yourself in to a corner” you might say, or, “completely fucked yourself and the prosecutor knows it and is going to use it”. But it’s only setting a trap in the sense that any airtight prosecution tactic based on rules and evidence that leaves the defendant no way out could be called a ‘trap’
Well its a good thing no famous or political person has ever been on trial then because obviously no jury on earth could handle that fairly if it ever were to happen. I think voir dire exists mainly to make sure that folks who think like that never make it on to juries. Just because some people couldn’t render an impartial verdict on a politician they had an opinion of doesn’t make it impossible for lawyers and judges to find a jury capable of doing so. People like that exist, and lawyers find them for trials all the time, I promise you.
Absolutely right. “Impartial” doesn’t mean you’ve never heard of the person, or never seen them on the news, or don’t live near them, or have no opinion of them, or haven’t heard or believe things about what they’ve done. It means just what you said, that whoever is picked will be able to listen to the evidence presented by both sides and make a decision based on that evidence. Apparently a huge number of people believe this is functionally impossible for humans to do, which is pretty sad if you’ve let your politics overwhelm your reason to such a degree that you think no one else can be objective either.
It’s a classic shithead defense to try and tell a judge “the paper did a piece on my crimes and everyone read it, so I can’t get a fair trial!!” Well guess what, that never works, for anyone, ever. There is no such thing as “too famous” for justice, there is no such thing as “too infamous” for justice. And there is no such thing as “the vast majority of people in NY and DC and GA hate me so badly because of who I am and what I’ve done that no one in those states can be allowed to judge me for my acts.”
Thankfully we put career criminals, well-known in their communities, who people have heard of, on trial all the time. Could you imagine if “I’m too famous as a dirtbag to be tried by a jury of my peers” was a defense?
And I’m sure that’s true to your personal experience. But I hope you’ll accept that for millions of Americans, we feel like one side wants to criminalize our very existence and way of life, and one side does not. Corruption aside, which I can agree is rampant across the spectrum, one side is openly questioning whether entire groups of people should be allowed to live out their lives enjoying the same freedoms as the rest of us, and that, for me, is important.
It’s my right to have my personal computer display what I want it to display. It’s my right set my device to reject internet traffic I don’t want to receive. It’s my right to instruct my machine to download the data I want, and refuse to download the data I don’t want. If you make something publicly available online, then the public can consume that or refuse that, in part or in whole, as and when they wish. If a company or a browser wants to try and interfere with that, then they’ve chosen their fate.
Can’t argue with that, but it’s a bit like saying that the surface of the Sun and a day at the beach are both hot. Like, I can’t argue with you because of how you stated it, but there are matters of degrees in both cases.
Yes, if there’s something every good scientist knows, its to present the best current understanding of something, and then the exact opposite of that, framed as being equally valid. For sure this is the way forward and good on you Zuck!