gAlienLifeform

gAlienLifeform, 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Archive today has been called out for creepy behavior by CloudFlare, so I don’t like to use them if it can be avoided. I normally use the Internet Archive, but they have been getting paywalled by NYT recently while GhostArchive has kept working for me.

e; full disclosure, I don’t know anything about the people behind GhostArchive, and frankly I don’t know enough about computer networking yet to say if they’re doing any creepy things, so it may very well be six of one and half a dozen of the other here

gAlienLifeform, 8 days ago

I mean,

The public defender assigned to represent Jones learned that he was oxygen-deprived at birth and had a lithium deficiency — a condition linked to serious psychiatric disorders. Jones’s medical records showed that he was medicated for mood disorders, had attempted suicide and was admitted to a mental hospital.

Despite having access to this information, Jones’s attorney did not further investigate his mental health until after he was convicted.

Jones’s lawyer presented three witnesses during sentencing, including a doctor to testify about his mental health issues. Dr. Jack Potts was only able to conduct a short examination of Jones, however, so his report was less than one page of analysis. Dr. Potts advocated for more testing, but the request was denied.

Like, setting aside the death penalty in general for a second, this is just a flagrant disregard of legal precedent when it comes to legal competency and ineffective assistance of counsel.

gAlienLifeform, 9 days ago

You’re not wrong

gAlienLifeform, 9 days ago

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/35a7fb7f-37b6-40fa-ad6d-0f1cb15c7644.jpeg

gAlienLifeform, 9 days ago

It gives us something new to troll those miserable asshats over. “Interesting argument, but have you considered the fact that your candidate is a convicted felon?”

gAlienLifeform, 9 days ago

Yes, about this in particular

“We owned up to it, we investigated it, and we tried to learn from it to make changes,” Kirby said at Tuesday’s regular White House briefing.

Meanwhile, in reality

SIMON: The military is, I think I can fairly say, proud of all the checks that they have in place, aren’t they?

KHAN: Yes. So, in fact, you know, anyone who reads this investigation can easily find the military responses to the questions that we asked. They weren’t able to answer everything in terms of, you know, incident-specific remarks. But they did reply to six questions overall. And what they said was that, you know, they take great care, that every single loss of life is something that is regretted and that they take cares that their enemies don’t. They also say that, you know, they would disagree with this as a system of impunity. They see this as a model of accountability. Whereas the reporting showed that when you look at these documents and the breakdowns of them, only in two instances in the documents do they show them interviewing survivors and eyewitnesses. And certainly, those lessons learned were never studied in aggregate like this. So it’s hard to look at this and to know that they have far more of an ability than I do, or that an organization like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty does, to go and visit these sites and investigate themselves.

[Bolding added]

gAlienLifeform, 9 days ago

“The 542 drone strikes that Obama authorized killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians.”

gAlienLifeform, 9 days ago

Obama doesn’t get a pass because he was a Democrat

Yes, I feel very much the same way. The data (such as it is) should all be in there, but there’s likely still a bunch of these that we don’t know about, and (from the linked article)

President Obama deserves credit for even acknowledging the existence of the targeted killing program (something his predecessor did not do), and for increasing transparency into the internal processes that purportedly guided the authorization of drone strikes.

So the numbers between administrations might not be apples to apples comparable

though I disagree with being able to call it a war since “terror” is not a peer state.

I actually agree really strongly with this one too and don’t see it mentioned that often, but, yeah, terrorist organizations are really no different than organized crime operations (other than that they’re pursuing political objectives instead of money), and they should be handled the same way (e.g. by police, not militaries).

gAlienLifeform, 9 days ago

For real though, why was his license suspended in the first place? Like, I feel way differently about this story if the defendant is a repeat drunk driver vs someone who just didn’t pay to register their car or whatever.

gAlienLifeform, 9 days ago

They’ve only been around for a few years but have been reliable in my experience. Left of center in the topics they choose to cover, but factually correct coverage.

Article with some background - web.archive.org/…/prism-a-news-site-led-by-women-…

gAlienLifeform, 10 days ago

Looks like mądry Polak po szkodzie isn’t always the case

gAlienLifeform, 10 days ago

That’s not entirely fair, there’s a lot more the executive branch could be doing to try to fix this too

Of course, Justices Alito and Thomas could choose to recuse themselves — wouldn’t that be nice? But begging them to do the right thing misses a far more effective course of action.

The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.

The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 U.S.C. Section 455. The Constitution has come into play in several recent Supreme Court decisions striking down rulings by stubborn judges in lower courts whose political impartiality has been reasonably questioned but who threw caution to the wind to hear a case anyway. This statute requires potentially biased judges throughout the federal system to recuse themselves at the start of the process to avoid judicial unfairness and embarrassing controversies and reversals.

gAlienLifeform, 10 days ago

Yep, but I don’t know if they’re complicit because they genuinely like the way things are heading or complicit because they worry if they push back at all our society could totally break down into factions and they’re not sure which side the cops and soldiers will choose, and those are two very different reasons for going along with things

Also, regardless of all of this - just by virtue of the fact that the Democratic party at the very least has to keep up the appearance of opposing the Republicans, we’re all a lot better off with them winning elections, so I do recommend voting for them whenever you get the chance, just realize that’s only step 1

e; words is hard sometimes

gAlienLifeform, 10 days ago

Doesn’t matter, just wash you hands when you’re done

gAlienLifeform, 15 days ago (edited 15 days ago)

Recent 5-4 podcast episode about Hans v Louisiana also does a good job of diving into this history and laying out just how much bullshit these immunity doctrines are built on,

www.fivefourpod.com/episodes/hans-v-louisiana/

gAlienLifeform, 15 days ago

When one person stands up by themselves or with only a small group around them, the powers that be drop the hammer on them and everyone who was sympathetic and might have supported them gets scared back into line