Comment Re:I'd hate to be the guy (Score 1) 29
Antiprotons, the forbidden PopRocks
Antiprotons, the forbidden PopRocks
I think what he meant to say, is that if Lewinsky had been a decade younger (12 instead of 22), then nothing would have happened.
This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
You don't get to pick and choose what people post (with some obvious exceptions like fraud or csam), while also claiming immunity for the stuff you couldn't or wouldn't.
Exactly, thanks for the excellent example. That's the kind of statement that nobody ever explains, but always presents as pure axiomatic dogma.
I do think that you might have revealed a clue in your unusual phrasing, though. You said "claiming immunity for the stuff you couldn't or wouldn't" but how can there ever be any possibility of liability there? If your computer denies someone else's request to publish something, what liability is there to be immune from?
Yeah, what kind of idiot would think of using the internet to make money on porn?
Or some other Weekly World News cast member?
are automakers responsible when someone breaks the speed limit and kills someone?
What's funny is that there's no such thing as "vicarious speeding" or "contributory reckless driving," but with copyright, there is. Analogously, sometimes the automaker is liable for drivers speeding!
But even so, Cox's behavior didn't fit contributory infringement.
The court just said T17 S501 is an ok law that they're not striking it down or anything like that, but it doesn't apply to this case!
A very good thing has happened.
The people who say that, never supply a reason. It's just dogma.
My counter-dogma: nuh uh.
The Second Amendment was intended to be a check on federal power. None of the amendments were incorporated into jurisprudence about what individual states could do until arguably 1890 and not certainly until the early 1920s. Many states had laws around firearm storage for decades. In the 1830s, Massachusetts was the first among several states to generally bar carriage of firearms in public. Texas would follow suit in 1871.
The Heller decision written by Scalia was a sea change in constitutional law, but it laid down important limits that were respected in the MacDonald decision that followed soon after and which incorporated the Second Amendment as applying to states as well as the federal government. Scalia wrote that firearm law limitations were presumptively lawful, and essentially laid down an opportunity for the federal government to prohibit future types of weapons sales by preventing them from becoming publicly available. Here's what he wrote (citations removed).
We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those "in common use at the time." We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of "dangerous and unusual weapons."
It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.
Scalia had no problem with regulating or even banning public availability of broad classes of weapons as long as those available to the public continued to be available to the public. In his view, existing weapons like missiles and new weapons like portable lasers could be banned because they were not "in common use." However, Scalia died in 2016, and the Court has moved to a substantially broader view than he had.
What are you going to do when Nazi Trump really ramps up the persecution? Oh right, sit back and protest and hope the government doesn't murder you all, ie just like Iran did to it's protesters two months ago.
The people who have clamored most over the last 40 years about government overreach are largely those most supportive of Trump's tyrannical behavior. However, the fastest growing segment of gun owners in the last couple of years are those on the left, with even more disproportionate growth among minorities. There are a lot of former military who are very unhappy with the direction that he's taken, too. There are a lot of guns on both sides and not nearly enough police or military to handle them all.
So far, the Trump administration's own overreach has been embarrassing enough to force them to back off. The videos of the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were bad enough, but the responses by almost everyone up to and including Trump in labeling them terrorists and declaring that the ICE and CBP agents did no wrong before we even had multiple views of what happened caused them to backpedal (even the NRA chimed in against the administration). Bovino was removed from Minnesota and demoted, resulting in him either deciding or being forced to retire. They sent Tom Homan in, and the first thing he did was withdraw half of the agents assigned there, and most of the rest have returned to their assigned jurisdictions. Noem's constant bluster and media presence have sidelined her in the administration, destroyed almost any chance of a political future and cast a permanent pall over the brutal enforcement actions under her watch. Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, isn't much better in terms of policy goals, but he has said that he doesn't like and doesn't want the constant press from extreme actions. The GOP, including Trump, is being forced to negotiate on things in the DHS budget bill that Trump declared just a couple of weeks ago were nonnegotiable. Trump's actions in Iran have backfired, and so far, the only negotiations happening seem to be in his own imagination, leaving him looking even worse, even among his own supporters.
They're weak and they know it, and their support isn't as solid as it was a year ago. Whether this means they continue to back down or they suddenly lash out, I don't know. But if they do move to mass violence, it isn't going to be against a group of unarmed pansies entirely incapable of shooting back. I hope it doesn't come to that, because it will become impossible to predict the outcome.
It's illegal but laws aren't currently enforced, so I don't know why you're bringing the law up.
Let's perform a natural experiment: keep saying reappropriation is illegal, and then wait for the executive to do it anyway. Then watch to see if Congress gives a fuck, by impeaching the executive (or credibly threatening to impeach if the embezzled funds aren't returned in n hours).
My hypothesis is that Congress won't do anything about it, and is fine with whatever new powers that the president decides he wants.
What's your hypothesis?
Surprise: we're actually going to do that experiment. In fact, we started it last year.
APL hackers do it in the quad.