WhatTrees

You make a great point. I can see why cops would be on edge and would rather risk taking someone into custody unnecessarily rather than putting their life at risk. Based on your reasoning they would probably be hyper vigilant for signs a stop might go wrong. Given an employers responsibility to provide a safe workplace, they are probably trained to err on the side of caution, right?

No. Absolutely not. “Officer safety” isn’t a blank check. Officer’s first duty is to the law and the constitution, even before their own safety. You don’t get to violate someone’s right because you were scared, especially when the officers never once mention a safety threat. The only thing they say when they pull out the driver is “when we tell you to do something, you do it.” You can keep imagining that this is about safety, but it’s transparently not. It’s about an officer who got butt-hurt when someone didn’t suck his dick hard enough.

A rather obvious diss and strawman argument, but I see your point. What you are ignoring though is the reasonable person who is employed as a cop.

You are not a cop I assume, which is why I said person. The legal standard is “reasonable officer”. The point still stands, nothing he did was objectively reasonable by the legal standard.

If you had that job, how much would you be willing to risk death on a daily basis to give people the benefit of the doubt?

If I was a cop, I would recognize that I volunteered for a dangerous job where my primary responsibility is to the rights of the citizens I supposedly protect. I would not violate someone’s rights just because I had a completely unjustified fear. Are we just going to brush past the fact that this unjustified fear just happened to be directed towards a black man? That must just be coincidence, right?

So sue the fuck out of him! That’s what the courts are for. That’s a separate issue from whether the cop decided he was non-cooperative at a level that warranted intervention.

Well, no it’s not. The courts determine what is reasonable and legal. The cop doesn’t get to violate rights or laws even if he thinks the situation warranted intervention. He must have an objectively reasonable and legal reason for that intervention. Short of that, what he did was unreasonable and illegal. That’s the whole point. And again, you haven’t pointed to a single thing he did as showing non-cooperation, especially not enough to warrant all that followed in a legal way. As I’ve outlined numerous times now, he didn’t refuse any order given. The only one he didn’t comply with fast enough for the officer was the order to exit in which the officer gave him 7 seconds before resorting to violence.

That’s the whole point of qualified immunity. Cops are the ones willing to wade into the shit on a daily basis. They put their lives on the line, so they get the discretion to decide they are going to cuff you for the rest of the interaction if they feel unsafe.

It’s shocking how little you understand about how this all works. QI gives them legal protection for things that are not well established at the time of the interaction. It gives them cover for interpreting a law in the grey. Pulling someone out without reasonable suspicion they are armed and dangerous is not a grey area, it was decided by the Supreme Court decades ago. Not using excessive force is per-se well established (meaning QI does not apply when using unreasonable and unjustified force, like say punching a handcuffed suspect). I’ll gloss over your completely insane framing of officers as “putting their lives on the line” and “willing to wade into this shit” and just say, do yourself a favor and look up the Castle Rock case and Uvalde before trying to suck them off next time.

If they break the law, sue them. If policy is bad, lobby for change. People wrote the laws, people set the culture, people can change it. But just whining online that some sports guy you like wasn’t treated as politely as you would have liked is like having a quick wank, it makes you feel good, but won’t change anything.

I don’t give a shit about sports ball or this guy in the slightest. I had never even heard his name until this news broke. This isn’t about “not being polite enough”. The driver was treated in an illegal manner by a power-tripping cop because he didn’t act as nicely and apologetically as this officer thought he was entitled to. That officer can get fucked. And the fact that the police union stated their full support of him before the video even came out should tell you something.

What exactly would you suggest to make things better? This kind of talk online led to the largest protests in American history just a few years ago and after months that led to nothing. And you aren’t here advocating for change, you’ve been defending the officer and presuming he is right about everything this whole conversation.

If you think you can do better, go apply for a job with the force, show us what the police could be. If you are going to let someone else do it so you don’t have to take the risk and can sit safely at home whining about it. Sure you can get some attention, but you aren’t going to be taken very seriously.

Oh yes, the classic “our job is so hard, why don’t you try it”. Got any more stereotypical cop defense lines you wanna throw out? Maybe a “he should have just complied” in there? No thanks, I have too much self-respect to be a pig. That being said, I don’t have to be a quarterback to know when a footballer makes a bad play. I don’t have to be a doctor to know not to listen to a quack. I don’t have to be a cop to know a power-tripping tyrant when I see one.

You’re implying here that he failed to comply with lawful orders, which ones exactly did he fail to comply with? As I outlined before he was ordered to not roll his window back up again and he did not (even if he had, that alone is not a lawful order as no case law or Florida law allows an officer to order someone to roll it all the way down and keep it down for the duration of the stop). He was ordered out of the car (a lawful order as outlined by case law if the officer has reasonable suspicion that he is armed and dangerous. The officer makes no claim to the driver being armed and dangerous, much less having reasonable suspicion of such. This was not an armed robbery stop) and within 7 seconds was dragged out of the car. The driver never said no and was not given time to comply. While you must exit when ordered (again, if the officer has what he needs to make that order lawful), it is not reasonable to drag someone out after only 7 seconds.

If he had failed to follow lawful orders, why didn’t they charge him with that?

Having distain or reluctance are not illegal acts and are not grounds for reasonable suspicion that someone is armed and dangerous. While a person intent on hurting officers would likely have distain, they would be more likely to act cool and calm until they pull out their gun as to keep the officer from sensing a threat and reacting to it. There are also far more people who have distain for officers and do not which them harm. It is not objectively reasonable for an officer to believe that every person who does not show them sufficient deference is a safety concern, especially not a sufficient concern to justify physical violence against them.

If he had wanted to, why wouldn’t he have already done it? Why didn’t he pull out a gun (there is no indication by him or the officers that a gun was involved)? Why wouldn’t he have tried harming them as they pulled him out? Again, your what-ifs are not relevant to a discussion about the reasonableness of the officer’s actions. An officer doesn’t get to do whatever he feels like as long as he can imagine a possible harm.

Take a look at all of the officer’s actions and attempt to see them from a reasonable person’s perspective. He pulled over a guy for speeding, not armed robbery. He got upset only after the driver rolled the window up as he was walking away. He gave the driver only 7 seconds to respond before using physical violence. He punched the driver while he was handcuffed. He lied about a 25ft law and then expanded it beyond what the made-up law would allow. After 18 minutes of having him in handcuffs, he only started to write the citations, the whole reason for the stop, when a supervisor asked him if they were already done. Officers can only hold a personal as long as it would reasonably take to accomplish the goal of the stop, in this case to write the tickets. Every step of the way, the officer acting unreasonably. I don’t care if you can imagine a different scenario where he might have been justified. In this case he was not.

You’re arguing that we should defer to the officers because of a million imaginary what-ifs. That’s not how this works.

Oh definitely, and the way we get that change is by instinctively supporting the officer’s decisions because of a thousand imagined what-ifs. Of course that officer had to shoot Sonya Massey because she might have thrown the water at them while cowering with her hands up. She might have had a wmd under her night dress! /s

Police don’t get to act on every imaginable what-if, they must act reasonably based on the specifics of the case in front of them. Watch the video again and pay attention to the time in the body cams.

The officer knocks on the window and the driver rolls it down and hands him his paperwork while complaining about the knocking. As the officer goes to walk away the driver rolls the window back up. The officer tells him to roll it back down, the driver opens it some. The officer tells him not to roll it up again or he would be taken out of the car. Within 7 seconds the officer changed his mind, ordered him out, and then dragged him out.

Important notes here. 1) not rolling the window all the way down or rolling it back up while the officer walks away are not illegal acts. There is no case law saying you must roll it all the way down and leave it down. 2) while it’s down the officer could see inside and did not note any obvious safety concerns. 3) he wanted the window down while he was walking away and couldn’t see inside anyway. 4) the driver never refused exiting the car and was not given a reasonable amount of time to comply. He said something like “just a moment” when asked once and was dragged out within 7 seconds. 5) the officers don’t later say that they had a safety concern, they say “when we tell you to do something you have to do it” in reference to the window, which again is not an order backed up by case law unlike the order to exit which again was not refused and not given reasonable time for the driver to comply.

You could always imagine a what-if that lets the cops off, but that’s not the way the courts do or the public should view these cases. The primary officer was unreasonable at almost every point. Later in the video he points to a 25ft law that isn’t in effect yet and then says that he has suddenly changed it to 50ft. He was on a power trip because the driver didn’t immediately show him proper deference.

You also have a right to collect Nazi memorabilia if you want, doesn’t mean I’m not going to call you weird.

Do you think there might be anything different between collecting swords and collecting guns? Do you think most people who live in urban environments have a need for a semi-auto military style, magazine-fed rifle? What about multiple of them? What about machine guns?

I, for one, am shocked, shocked that defenders of Russia are still using the same easily disproven lies to justify invading, occupying, and murdering a neighboring country.

It’s not like Russia has a history of lying about its military operations in Ukraine or anything, right?

It’s the second half of your claim you’d have to support with evidence. Of course we help fund them, but it’s not so clear that they “benefit Hamas”".

If you read something like this article here, you’d note that of the 19 alleged ties to Hamas (of 34,000 workers btw) none have been found to be supported by evidence. Some of them are still going, and maybe they will show some kind of connection, but A) the time to believe that is when evidence is provided, not when the claim is made and B) I don’t really think cutting funding for an agency that does legitimate help to people currently starving and dying is justified just because 0.05% of employees have ties to Hamas. Would you be Ok condemning and demanding we cut funding to the IDF if we found 0.05% of their personnel had ties to radical Zionist movements calling for the eradication of Palestinians? Something tells me you wouldn’t.

Well, it happened in 2008 and 2020, so all we gotta do is wait for the economic crash in 2032 and we’ll be set!

Sorry for the confusion, the battery part of my reply was related to forcibly ending someone else’s pregnancy, which would have to involve some kind of battery unless it’s like poison or something, not related to the embryos in the freezer. There is no battery to those since they are not people.

From what I’ve previously read the agency that had the frozen embryos did not let them die off, they stored them properly in an industrial freezer kept at far below 0 temps. The issue was a person who didn’t work at the clinic snuck into the room with the fridge, opened it and then dropped the embryos and ran away (the article said the assumption was because the containers were so cold he got freeze-burned). There might be a case here that they didn’t do enough to stop the individual, or check on them often enough, I don’t know enough details to know, but it doesn’t sound like they just simply didn’t care or didn’t store them properly.

States have long had laws against forcibly ending someone else’s pregnancy and those have stood up even before Roe died. It’s not usually on the level of murder/manslaughter, but at a minimum it’s been treated as a destruction of property. You don’t have to treat the embryo as a person to charge someone with aggravated battery or something similar.

The main issue here is the broadness of this ruling (besides the whole quoting the Bible thing) which equates embryos with full-human life. It won’t change a whole lot in this case, the families could have still sued for negligence or destruction of property, or any number of other civil remedies of this was denied, but now it’s laid the ground work to do much worse things in the future.

Ya. This only ends one of two ways, either Israel succeeds in killing /displacing the people of Gaza (West Bank and Golem Heights next) and fills it with people loyal to them, or they stop the occupation. Terrorist groups don’t do well in stable, prosperous nations. If they really want Hamas and groups like them gone forever, they will have to take the winds out of their sails by letting the Palestinians have a real government with real control over itself. Even if they meet their stated goal of “destroying Hamas”, it (or another similar but even more extreme) group will take over.

I am obligated by my work to offer this to customers when they buy an HP printer and I make it really clear that it’s a bad deal for most customers. There are some edge case examples, like a lady with a small business who always prints exactly like 3 pages a day. The other customers who agree to buy it are almost always the super old people who don’t want to have to come to the store to get more ink. I think it’s a shit program that should be scrapped entirely, but some people really don’t care if it’s a bad deal as long as they get the convenience. No different than 7-11 up charging shit because it’s easier to buy it at the market down the street than the Walmart a few miles down the road.

Maybe you missed the everyone in the previous post. It doesn’t matter if it’s two people in the country (it’s likely at least a million, that would be less than 0.3%), no one eligible should not be able to vote.

I think they meant “citizen*'s* arrest” as in “arrest of a citizen”. Not a citizen doing the arrest, as in “citizens arrest” .

There would be the same reaction if FB or Instagram or any other big platform was found to be allowing ads next to objectionable content (content the company in the ads would not want associated with their brand) AND that platform said that it wasn’t an issue, they won’t change policies to prevent it, and told them to go fuck themselves.

Twitter could absolutely have filters in place to prevent ads from showing up next to literal Nazi posts with a simple word list. The posts Media Matters showed were not subtle or underhanded, they were saying the quiet parts out loud. It would be trivial to prevent ads entirely from those posts, but then they’d lose ad space. It would mean less if this had happened with borderline posts or posts using coded language.

Facebook faced a ton of backlash for it and only stayed around because they are big enough that companies thought they’d lose more money by not offering their app then they’d lose by offering it. Also, as bad as Facebook moderation is, they were actively removing posts and banning users for things they said about J6 (odd to call it a protest but ok), which Parlor was refusing to do until after they were removed from the app stores. Parlor wanted to be all about free speech (hmmm just like Twitter now says they want to be) and refused to moderate the calls for violence until they were forced to by the big three, which led a lot of users to be angry at them and leave for other free speech platforms even less moderate than FB or Parlor.

So, are you saying you don’t have any evidence they colluded in the past, and no evidence that they colluded now, but are still believing it?

until they were able to get ads to show up

Yes, so they were able to get them to show up then. That means there are not mechanisms in place at Twitter that would prevent those ads from showing up next to Nazi posts. Which means the companies absolutely had a reason to pull ad funding. If you owned a company and were spending millions on ads, would you be ok knowing that it’s possible your ad shows up next to Nazi posts or Holocaust denial? Would it matter that it doesn’t happen most of the time? If it’s possible then Twitter has massively dropped the ball.

Where in the article do they say those ads “always” show up beside Nazi posts? They outlined their methods, and showed screenshots for proof. Even the CEO confirmed that those ads did show up next to Nazi posts, she just claimed it didn’t happen often. Media matters never claimed they happened all the time with every ad. If you had above a 5th grade reading level or had read the original article you’d know better.

Did any of those hearings end with a conclusion and solid evidence of collusion? How many of those companies or executives at those companies got convicted of market manipulation or conspiracy, or even charged?

Once again you are pointing to multiple independent companies, who are each other’s direct competitors, doing something at the same time and attributing that to collusion when there is no evidence for that at all. Is it that hard to imagine that multiple companies would decide at the same time to stop offering an app that harms their brand? Especially when those companies were getting heat because Parlor was used to organize the Insurrection and had many calls for violence? Also, are you now claiming that they previously colluded in support of Twitter but are now colluding against it?

You seem to have a tenuous grasp on…well, everything, but certainly reality. Companies do what they think will make them the most money. If all three thought that having Parlor on their app store, or ads on Twitter next to neonazis would make them less money than not doing those things, they would decide not to do them. It’s really really basic stuff.

By definition, a blockade is an act of war, regardless of who does it. I’m not sure why you’d think I wouldn’t call the US blockading some country and act of war (although I have a guess), just as much as I’d call Israel blockading Palestine as an act of war.

The reason other countries don’t respond to a US blockade with all-out war is because we get other countries to agree to the blockade first and then do it as a block, which means the blockaded country would have to be prepared to fight the US plus its allies. Given the relative size of the countries’ militaries involved, the blockaded ones usually decide not to fight.

Agreeing with the US’s decision to support Taiwan against China is not the same as support for all US military decisions, or even most of them.

That’s a pretty wild guess given how China keeps doing military drills involving amphibious landings and flying into Taiwanese airspace/going into Taiwanese waters. You wouldn’t practice amphibious landings to prepare a defense against the US, you’d do that to prepare for an invasion. China talks a lot about not using its military outside its borders, which has been mostly true, but they see Taiwan as within their borders so it doesn’t really tell us much.

If China wants to limit imports of goods from Taiwan they absolutely could, and it would be difficult for the US/Japan to respond to, but if by “restricting trade” you mean a blockade then that is an act of war that the US/Japan would respond to much more aggressively. Just like China would respond if we blockaded them.