If I had mod points and hadn't already posted, I would mod this up to 5. The Justine Sacco case is particularly heartbreaking. The only real crime she's guilty of is not realizing that a P.R. person needs to be emotionless and humorless, along with other people in high-profile positions of corporations.

An interesting part of the Curt Schilling case and the whole Gamergate thing is that it fully democratizes who is targeted by online mobs. You don't need to be a person of great standing to attract interest of a mob now.

I... this is hurting my brain.

Maybe not speed traps, but most people would say that local policing in the community is far more important than a local cop in Chattanooga, Tennessee trying and failing to do something because someone in Sioux City, Iowa said something mean on the Internet. Especially once you cross state lines, police interest in the matter (and ability to do anything about it) will greatly wane.

It's a Lord of the Flies environment. It shows what people will do to each other if they think there are no rules that will be applied to them and they can do whatever they want without consequence. Given that, I'm amazed how well the Internet works. Maybe it's a reason to be optimist after all, that it's still just a small number of vocal people who act out of misanthropy.

Before the Internet, if you made those sorts of threats to a teenage girl, you would have gotten the shit kicked out of you, because you had to actually face people in your local community with the public shame your actions brought. But now, millions of people are more closely connected than ever before and the possibilities for consequence-free trolling are greater. Schilling was bringing back a bit of the public shame aspect, the notion that maybe people (or at least, not as many) would make those attacks if people knew it was them.

If you want to make rapey threats to a teenage girl, then you had better be willing to stand by those statements. Publicly. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.

If one of those idiots kills himself from the embarrassment, there is one, and exactly one person to blame: that idiot making the threat in the first place.

SJW used to be a great term. It was descriptive and just denigrating enough to show how SJW actions were far more offensive than the imagined-or-not offense of their target.

Then Gamergate happened and "SJW" got hijacked to the point where it's useless as a term, and says as much about the people using it as it does the people it's being applied to.

Speed limit violations are easy, low-hanging fruit compared to the confusing morass of online investigations. You think the standard beat cop would make a good online detective?

Not to mention, speed limit violations involve crimes that may be physically dangerous (as opposed to "someone said something on the Internet"), are actually within jurisdiction of police departments, and have the added benefit of bringing money into the police department.

How long were we supposed to stay? We had already been there for 10 years. Do we stay and send our soldiers to die from IEDs for ... 20 years? 25? 30? What is the cut-off?

When will we admit that maybe the Middle East has to solve their own problems, and that peace can't be militarily imposed upon them?

The problem seems to be with Greek society, specifically the corruption that has become a matter of course there. I was a bit sad that "austerity" did nothing to address one of the bigger issues: tax evasion.

I... what?

Are you confusing Iran with Iraq or something? The current leadership in Iran has been in place since 1979.

You guys are funny.

Someone, spare some +1 Funny mods for this shit!

Fortunately we live in real life, not the world of The Ring.

It's not an order, it's a treaty, or at least an agreement there. You need to two to tango there, and Iraq's leadership insisted on one of two outcomes: total withdrawal by the previously agreed-upon date, or subjecting American troops to foreign laws and trials.

Our partner in the government from 2006 to 2014, al-Maliki, is maybe the only Iraqi leader I can think of who was worse for his country than Saddam Hussein. Saddam's hideous policies were certainly barbaric against his own people, but at least he was a strong enough leader that he could suppress rebellion without them coalescing into groups like ISIS. Maliki was a Shia who saw no problem with brutalizing the Sunni majority, because apparently fucking Shia and Sunni can never get along, and he's one of the few in power who was happy to really twist the screws. However, he was no where near the sort of strongman dictator that you would need to be to maintain power, so his policies directly fed into the creation of ISIS. Fuck that guy.

The President signs in or refuses to sign in laws. He owns it as much as any legislator.

If Obamacare had never passed, would you be paying considerably MORE for your health insurance now than you did in years past? Yes, yes you would, because they insurers raise rates sky-high because they can. The law gives them a great deflection tool, though, a way for the insurers to try to claim that they wouldn't have raised rates if that law hadn't forced them to. What a joke.

Depending on the state, some gay people can marry. I certainly did. But you're right, Obama deserves credit merely for going with the flow. Once numerous states allowed gay marriage, he simply said the feds would recognize it if the states allowed it. But that's probably the way it should be, with individual states deciding it's time, and the feds taking their direction from then. That sort of thing usually works better than a top-down imposition of doctrine, federal-to-state.

"Activist judges" is usually code for "they issued a decision based on law rather than my personal moral/religious beliefs, so I don't like that." In most cases, anti-gay-marriage laws ran afoul of the states' own constitutions.

They're identical.... in different ways. Yes, those sound like weasel words, but it means that both parties will have a "my way or the highway" attitude, coming up with their own vision and agenda of The Way Things Ought to Be, with that being strictly imposed. But the differences in those agendas... man, the differences mean the world to many.