"Wisdom and legality are not the same thing."
Who said it was? My point was that starting a fight you can't possibly win is generally regarded as unwise.
Depends. Sometimes the costs of doing an ordinarily unwise thing are less than the costs of the alternative, rendering the ordinarily unwise wise.
The libertarian (and Paul's) position is that the government has no business concerning matters of religion be it promoting *or* forbidding them.
I'm not sure that's quite right. It seems to me he wants to give states and local governments wide latitude to cram religion down our throats, uninhibited by the federal government. For example, see his remarks on the posting of the Ten Commandments in government buildings.
His stance on abortion is similar despite his personal religious convictions.
His stance on abortion seems to also be that government can cram religion down our throats all it wants, as long as it's state government that's doing the cramming. According to his wikiepedia page:
Paul calls himself "strongly pro-life",[167] "an unshakable foe of abortion",[168] and believes regulation or ban[169] on medical decisions about maternal or fetal health is "best handled at the state level".[170][171] He says his years as an obstetrician led him to believe life begins at conception;[172] his abortion-related legislation, like the Sanctity of Life Act, is intended to negate Roe v. Wade and to get "the federal government completely out of the business of regulating state matters."
Given that I live in a state that would probably ban all abortions if it could, and that I belong to a religion which holds that the morality of each abortion depends on the specific circumstances, I find this troubling.
It's nice to have someone _as good as_ Feingold from a shitty place like Wisconsin...
What's your beef with Wisconsin? I mean I know a Kevin Smith movie called it worse than Hell, but what else you got?
but he's no Ron Paul.
Yeah, no shit. It's not his job to be Ron Paul. As a Democrat Feingold supports all sorts of economic policies that Republicans and
Libertarians think violate individual liberty due to their naively constructed notions thereof, and he puts his money where his mouth is when it comes to keeping government from forcing religion down our throats.
That's a total non-starter. I own guns, but I consider my right to convenience in buying more guns to be less important than my right not to be shot by a convicted felon who's been allowed to buy guns without a background check. Also, last I read the 2nd Amendment, it doesn't say anything about right to avoid inconvenience in acquiring arms.
Feingold was part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, which I would say makes him a limiter of free speech.*
*For a suitably peculiar definition of free speech.
In essence, your right to mention an incumbent is contingent upon who funded you, and how close we are to the election.
Well, it's illegal to pay people to vote a certain way, and that's not considered a violation of the right to vote. How is the right to speak any different from the right to vote?
The Supreme Court has struck parts of this law out,
Yeah, it took them decades to find a supreme court conservative enough to do that (note that that decision wasn't just about McCain-Feingold but also struck down parts of several older campaign-finance laws). This same supreme court has ruled, by the same 5-4 margin, that when the government locks you up because of your religion and hires guards to beat the shit out of you can't bring suit against the people who planned that policy, only the people who implemented it. So I wouldn't hold being struck down 5-4 by the Roberts court against any law.
but protecting incumbents so blatantly hardly earns him a gold star for defense of freedom.
Campaign-finance restrictions were about protecting incumbents?? Really?? Think about it: who has the connections to get the money to lock in an election through dominating the airwaves? Incumbents. McCain-Feingold was basically the only thing in politics working in favor of leveling the playing field between incumbents and newcomers in the last 20 years. After McCain-Feingold was overturned, Feingold was practically guaranteed re-election until he voluntarily chose to hold himself to the standards of McCain-Feingold once again. Yeah, a real pro-incumbent cad there, for sure. We're talking about a man who stuck to his anti-protecting-incumbent principles even to the extent of sacrificing his own job.
His opposition to the PATRIOT Act is noted, however.
The reporters who reveled the watergate scandal, also kept lots of it secrets and didn't divulge into every piece of paper the republican's created that year, only the parts that referenced the scandal.
Wikileaks simply dumped the entire contents onto the web. So far there hasn't been anything really damning about them, except the fact that diplomatic relationships are now shattered across the world.
That's why those of us who are paying attention compare Wikileaks to the Pentagon Papers, not to Watergate. The Pentagon Papers were also a verbatim dump of masses of documents which contained a lot of mundane stuff which Beacon Press published, in addition to the juicier excerpts published by the NYT.
There are a small handful of votes where Ron Paul has voted in a way that would be upsetting to left-liberals (gay adoption in DC comes to mind), but aside from that, I don't think there is anyone in DC more passionately committed to personal freedom than Ron Paul.
There absolutely is. Unfortunately, he got voted out so he's leaving DC in January. Goodbye, Russ Feingold. WTG Wisconsin.
What if the "something she said" is criminal incitement to violence and the police aren't doing anything about it?
That's what they said about the publishing of images of Mohammad not so long ago.
I don't know anybody who said that. I don't know any way you can say publishing images of Muhammed is an instruction to someone to kill someone else. Palin directly called for killing Julian Assange.
But all the cool kids hate Palin, so that makes it OK.
Yeah, never mind that what she said is completely different in every way from what you're trying to compare it to. That can't possibly have anything to do with it.
I know you were making a joke, but I have to answer seriously because the question is a surprisingly apt one. In Twombly the SCOTUS ruled that you can't just allege facts showing lawful activity and say they constitute a pattern of unlawful activity, you have to allege at least one specific fact that permits the inference of unlawful activity. Under the standard prior to Twombly, your case would only get dismissed if it was clear you could prove "no set of facts" that could support it; naturally, the letter of the law before Twombly said cases could almost never get dismissed for failure to state a claim, but many absurd suits met the "no set of facts" test and judges dismissed them anyway, because they were absurd. So Twombly basically brought the letter of the law (case law, that is) in line with how it had always been applied in practice.
In Iqbal, the court took this a few steps further and ruled that you can't base your cause of action on any "conclusory" statements, that is basically that you have to plead specific facts for every element of your cause of action. They claim to be applying prior law even-handedly, but the dissent (in this 5-4 decision) does a really good job of pointing out how impossible a burden the court is putting on plaintiffs in certain types of actions to know all the details up front. The whole point of discovery is that there are details you can't know when you first file the suit but that will be relevant to the case; under Iqbal you have to know enough details with enough specificity to basically prove your whole case before you get to discovery, for certain types of cases (discrimination is a good example).
Hate to spoil your party, but Anonymous is everyone until you start leaving your ID everywhere, then anonymous is:
72.101.37.123
69.69.69.69
12.39.17.8
etc.
Next, we have all those legal transgressions in Sweden: (1) the leaking of the investigation by prosecutor Maria Kjellstrand to rightwing tabloids, in violation of Swedish secrecy laws; (2) the further leaking of Assange's file by person or persons unknown in the Swedish Prosecution Authority, in direct violation of their secrecy laws;
How ironic, a leaker getting his information leaked...
Not really. These aren't "protesters trying to stop a building project." Like it or not, they're also criminals who are disrupting websites and networks that other folks are paying to use. However, let's humor you and say they're simple protesters.
How is that any different from protesters trying to stop a building project? It's pretty typical for protesters to physically place their bodies on the property where the project is to take place and then affix said bodies there by, for instance, chaining themselves to an existing building or structure. This is criminal trespass and disturbing the peace, among other things. You make this distinction like normal protesters are good and wholesome but these internet folks are criminals! In truth, most successful protests involve crimes.
As every person who engages in civil disobedience knows, you've got to be prepared to be arrested/punished. The long arm of the law doesn't always roll their eyes and wait for you to go away.
Yeah, because as every person who engages in civil disobedience knows, engaging in civil disobedience makes you an actual criminal. A righteous, principled criminal perhaps, but a criminal nonetheless.
Palin may be human but public figures open themselves to criticism.
You're free to criticize her all you like. You are not free to damage, attempt to damage, or otherwise engage in any kind of criminal mischief against her, her family, her property, or her vendors (ISP, hosting provider, etc) because you don't like something she said.
What if the "something she said" is criminal incitement to violence and the police aren't doing anything about it?
Would this also result in them being charged with conspiracy?
No. "Conspiracy" and "joint and several liability" are distinct and essentially unrelated concepts. They might also be charged with conspiracy but it wouldn't be because they were jointly and severally liable.
Slashdot Mirror
"Wisdom and legality are not the same thing." Who said it was? My point was that starting a fight you can't possibly win is generally regarded as unwise.
Depends. Sometimes the costs of doing an ordinarily unwise thing are less than the costs of the alternative, rendering the ordinarily unwise wise.
Your background checks aren't in the Constitution either, and go directly against the Second Amendment.
Go against it how?
The libertarian (and Paul's) position is that the government has no business concerning matters of religion be it promoting *or* forbidding them.
I'm not sure that's quite right. It seems to me he wants to give states and local governments wide latitude to cram religion down our throats, uninhibited by the federal government. For example, see his remarks on the posting of the Ten Commandments in government buildings.
His stance on abortion is similar despite his personal religious convictions.
His stance on abortion seems to also be that government can cram religion down our throats all it wants, as long as it's state government that's doing the cramming. According to his wikiepedia page:
Given that I live in a state that would probably ban all abortions if it could, and that I belong to a religion which holds that the morality of each abortion depends on the specific circumstances, I find this troubling.
Sorry, I don't think so.
It's nice to have someone _as good as_ Feingold from a shitty place like Wisconsin...
What's your beef with Wisconsin? I mean I know a Kevin Smith movie called it worse than Hell, but what else you got?
but he's no Ron Paul.
Yeah, no shit. It's not his job to be Ron Paul. As a Democrat Feingold supports all sorts of economic policies that Republicans and Libertarians think violate individual liberty due to their naively constructed notions thereof, and he puts his money where his mouth is when it comes to keeping government from forcing religion down our throats.
For example:
http://ontheissues.org/Senate/Russell_Feingold.htm#Gun_Control
That's a total non-starter. I own guns, but I consider my right to convenience in buying more guns to be less important than my right not to be shot by a convicted felon who's been allowed to buy guns without a background check. Also, last I read the 2nd Amendment, it doesn't say anything about right to avoid inconvenience in acquiring arms.
Feingold was part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, which I would say makes him a limiter of free speech.*
*For a suitably peculiar definition of free speech.
In essence, your right to mention an incumbent is contingent upon who funded you, and how close we are to the election.
Well, it's illegal to pay people to vote a certain way, and that's not considered a violation of the right to vote. How is the right to speak any different from the right to vote?
The Supreme Court has struck parts of this law out,
Yeah, it took them decades to find a supreme court conservative enough to do that (note that that decision wasn't just about McCain-Feingold but also struck down parts of several older campaign-finance laws). This same supreme court has ruled, by the same 5-4 margin, that when the government locks you up because of your religion and hires guards to beat the shit out of you can't bring suit against the people who planned that policy, only the people who implemented it. So I wouldn't hold being struck down 5-4 by the Roberts court against any law.
but protecting incumbents so blatantly hardly earns him a gold star for defense of freedom.
Campaign-finance restrictions were about protecting incumbents?? Really?? Think about it: who has the connections to get the money to lock in an election through dominating the airwaves? Incumbents. McCain-Feingold was basically the only thing in politics working in favor of leveling the playing field between incumbents and newcomers in the last 20 years. After McCain-Feingold was overturned, Feingold was practically guaranteed re-election until he voluntarily chose to hold himself to the standards of McCain-Feingold once again. Yeah, a real pro-incumbent cad there, for sure. We're talking about a man who stuck to his anti-protecting-incumbent principles even to the extent of sacrificing his own job.
His opposition to the PATRIOT Act is noted, however.
Aw, thanks for throwing me a bone.
The reporters who reveled the watergate scandal, also kept lots of it secrets and didn't divulge into every piece of paper the republican's created that year, only the parts that referenced the scandal.
Wikileaks simply dumped the entire contents onto the web. So far there hasn't been anything really damning about them, except the fact that diplomatic relationships are now shattered across the world.
That's why those of us who are paying attention compare Wikileaks to the Pentagon Papers, not to Watergate. The Pentagon Papers were also a verbatim dump of masses of documents which contained a lot of mundane stuff which Beacon Press published, in addition to the juicier excerpts published by the NYT.
If there is a god, Rule34 will pass on this one.
I think the mere existence of Rule 34 is already proof there's not a god.
There are a small handful of votes where Ron Paul has voted in a way that would be upsetting to left-liberals (gay adoption in DC comes to mind), but aside from that, I don't think there is anyone in DC more passionately committed to personal freedom than Ron Paul.
There absolutely is. Unfortunately, he got voted out so he's leaving DC in January. Goodbye, Russ Feingold. WTG Wisconsin.
Basic property rights are for everyone, even the incompetent.
I didn't say he didn't have property rights. Wisdom and legality are not the same thing.
I hope you see the difference between private data and government (=public) data.
Of course I do, and I totally believe in Assange's right to privacy, where the government has no such right. I just thought it was funny.
That's what they said about the publishing of images of Mohammad not so long ago.
I don't know anybody who said that. I don't know any way you can say publishing images of Muhammed is an instruction to someone to kill someone else. Palin directly called for killing Julian Assange.
But all the cool kids hate Palin, so that makes it OK.
Yeah, never mind that what she said is completely different in every way from what you're trying to compare it to. That can't possibly have anything to do with it.
Right, because stooping to being a vigilante is always a good idea.
Hey, I didn't say it was a good idea. I just pointed out that "because you don't like something she said" was a bit of a deceptive way to put it.
What's Twombly without Iqbal?
The way the law should be, that's what.
I know you were making a joke, but I have to answer seriously because the question is a surprisingly apt one. In Twombly the SCOTUS ruled that you can't just allege facts showing lawful activity and say they constitute a pattern of unlawful activity, you have to allege at least one specific fact that permits the inference of unlawful activity. Under the standard prior to Twombly, your case would only get dismissed if it was clear you could prove "no set of facts" that could support it; naturally, the letter of the law before Twombly said cases could almost never get dismissed for failure to state a claim, but many absurd suits met the "no set of facts" test and judges dismissed them anyway, because they were absurd. So Twombly basically brought the letter of the law (case law, that is) in line with how it had always been applied in practice.
In Iqbal, the court took this a few steps further and ruled that you can't base your cause of action on any "conclusory" statements, that is basically that you have to plead specific facts for every element of your cause of action. They claim to be applying prior law even-handedly, but the dissent (in this 5-4 decision) does a really good job of pointing out how impossible a burden the court is putting on plaintiffs in certain types of actions to know all the details up front. The whole point of discovery is that there are details you can't know when you first file the suit but that will be relevant to the case; under Iqbal you have to know enough details with enough specificity to basically prove your whole case before you get to discovery, for certain types of cases (discrimination is a good example).
That would make a kick-ass title for something, I don't know what.
I'm pretty sure that would be an indie-rock band made up entirely of 1st-semester law school students who majored in philosophy and/or English.
what is a Low Orbit Ion Cannon?
It's what you use to shoot down satellites. Dummy.
Hate to spoil your party, but Anonymous is everyone until you start leaving your ID everywhere, then anonymous is: 72.101.37.123 69.69.69.69 12.39.17.8 etc.
How did you know it was me?
In other words, "Mostly Harmless."
3. It does give impartial background on the tool that I trust more than what Encyclopediadramatica says about it.
Dude, that site is totally reliable. It even has "Encyclopedia" in its name!
I mean, for comparison, even "Wikipedia" only has the "pedia" portion in its name. Therefore Encyclopediadramatica must be at least twice as reliable!
3. It does give impartial background on the tool that I trust more than what Encyclopediadramatica says about it.
Dude, that site is totally reliable. It even has "Encyclopedia" in its name!
Next, we have all those legal transgressions in Sweden: (1) the leaking of the investigation by prosecutor Maria Kjellstrand to rightwing tabloids, in violation of Swedish secrecy laws; (2) the further leaking of Assange's file by person or persons unknown in the Swedish Prosecution Authority, in direct violation of their secrecy laws;
How ironic, a leaker getting his information leaked...
Not really. These aren't "protesters trying to stop a building project." Like it or not, they're also criminals who are disrupting websites and networks that other folks are paying to use. However, let's humor you and say they're simple protesters.
How is that any different from protesters trying to stop a building project? It's pretty typical for protesters to physically place their bodies on the property where the project is to take place and then affix said bodies there by, for instance, chaining themselves to an existing building or structure. This is criminal trespass and disturbing the peace, among other things. You make this distinction like normal protesters are good and wholesome but these internet folks are criminals! In truth, most successful protests involve crimes.
As every person who engages in civil disobedience knows, you've got to be prepared to be arrested/punished. The long arm of the law doesn't always roll their eyes and wait for you to go away.
Yeah, because as every person who engages in civil disobedience knows, engaging in civil disobedience makes you an actual criminal. A righteous, principled criminal perhaps, but a criminal nonetheless.
Palin may be human but public figures open themselves to criticism.
You're free to criticize her all you like. You are not free to damage, attempt to damage, or otherwise engage in any kind of criminal mischief against her, her family, her property, or her vendors (ISP, hosting provider, etc) because you don't like something she said.
What if the "something she said" is criminal incitement to violence and the police aren't doing anything about it?
Would this also result in them being charged with conspiracy?
No. "Conspiracy" and "joint and several liability" are distinct and essentially unrelated concepts. They might also be charged with conspiracy but it wouldn't be because they were jointly and severally liable.
It's not "Script Kiddies" on 4chan. It's "Script Kitties" :-)
I believe you mean "Script Kittehs".
You MORORN, The HTTP port is WWW, even my GRANDMOTHER knows that!
I heard WWW was greek for 666, so I don't use the HTTP anymore.