“274”

wait, shit…

The requests were made under the guise of anti-terrorism laws

Remember this the next time someone in government says “We need tough anti-terrorism laws”. They also get to define what counts as terrorism, so anyone inconvenient can be destroyed and the public told “We’re just keeping you safe from terrorism.”

I WAS THE FIRST TO ADD A 9 TO A C NOW EVERY ACOUSTIC COVER FROM 1988 TO 2004 OWES ME $6

Sexual assault victims have a time limit. Copyright infringement “victims” do not. Tracks.

in this case, more like nudelwackeln

I never understood why that phrase was ever used as if it were an excuse.

A thought-terminating cliche is a rhetorical device intended to end a discussion without actually resolving it. The idea is to say something that the other party more or less has to agree to without regard to whether it actually has any bearing on the discussion at hand, and then refuse to discuss further. This makes it seem like the discussion is over and, as the last person who scored a point, you’ve won. “It’s just a few bad apples” is one. “Let’s agree to disagree” is another. Trump almost singlehandedly invented one in the phrase “fake news”, which is ostensibly intended to mean “I don’t trust the source of that information” but is often used in an infinite regression where everything unfriendly to the arguer is fake news. It’s basically a deus ex machina for arguments; a way to escape a corner you’ve been backed into without ever admitting that you were wrong about anything.

this one is just trigger-happy incompetence, but the phrase “a few bad apples” ends with “spoil the whole barrel” and the police are a perfect example of that. The way they close ranks and try to protect one another from responsibility for really egregious shit means that not every cop is a criminal, but that every cop ignores crimes that other cops commit.

my wife’s friend is a big believer in “not all cops” and “only a few bad apples”

does your wife’s friend know how the phrase “a few bad apples” ends?

Looking forward to when taxpayers who did absolutely nothing wrong have to pay a 7 figure settlement to you for your medical damages and a second 6 figure settlement to the officer for wrongful termination and then a further 5 figures a year to the officer in disability payments for the trauma he went through in having to shoot and kill an unarmed man who was on his knees with his hands in the air and sobbing (TW - that last link is the body cam for the murder of Daniel Shaver, don’t click it unless you like utter depravity and really high stakes games of Simon Says).

The worst part is he killed a dude

It’s simultaneously better and worse than that. The suspect in the cruiser wasn’t hit. This means that not only can the officer not tell the difference between an acorn and small arms fire, but that he was also unable to hit a restrained target at very close range. The only thing keeping us safe from police incompetence is police incompetence.

“You fit the description of a suspect.”

“The description is white male between 5’5” and 6’5" wearing jeans and a t shirt."

“SHOTS FIRED! SHOTS FIRED! OFFICER DOWN!”

are you american?

I’m just trying to establish conditions by which we all might agree that this is worth looking into before they happen. It’s easy to try to play connect the dots with the stars, there are a bunch of them already and you can just ignore the ones that don’t make the picture you want. I’m trying to add predictions to this theory in the name of the scientific method - if another whistleblower dies before his testimony is complete, that will be beyond what I can dismiss as coincidence.

Okay, but in the interest of not pretending that They Would Never™ can we all agree that if a THIRD whistleblower dies shortly before or during testimony that maybe something is happening here? You have the guy who committed suicide in the middle of depositions after telling his friend “If I commit suicide, no I absolutely did not” and now the healthy 45 year old who all of a sudden has multiple infections and a stroke. Is there a point at which you’d accept the idea that it’s a bit beyond coincidence that the deadliest place in the world seems to be the witness stand at a trial where Boeing is the defendant?

I mean, suiciding the guy who flat out told his friends “If I commit suicide no I didn’t” shows that agent 747 was due to update his techniques and understanding.

then lets assume a similar situation pops up, as they do from time to time. someone is hellbent on violence, is already committing a lot of violence, and is escalating rather than stopping. How would you architect a peaceful solution to that, and what would you say to the families of the people who were killed while you were architecting that peaceful solutions. It’s all well and good to say “there has to be some more peaceful solution” but then you have to actually find it and implement it.

what would you have done about world war II?

this feels very “if you kill a killer then the number of killers in the world stays the same”. the thing is, it’s the number of victims that matters.

the socratic dialogues from a world where plato was strangled 99% of the way to death by his umbilical cord

NNNNNNOOOOOOOO THIS IS LITERALLY THE MATRIX