Ethin Probst's Techdirt Profile

Ethin Probst

About Ethin Probst

Ethin Probst's Comments comment rss

  • Dec 04, 2025 @ 01:37pm

    Well this is a problem. I was going to move my infra to Scaleway's AMS1 data center. Mainly because their elastic metal offerings are really good. But this ruling is a big problemo. :P EU, please stop making nonsensical rulings like this...

  • Dec 03, 2025 @ 12:33pm

    Finally a court decides to hold these fuckers in contempt!

  • Dec 03, 2025 @ 08:27am

    Reportedly, Ceballos misunderstood the meaning of that residency and thought he was authorized to register to vote.
    How did this happen exactly? Like, not asking for the obvious answer (that our immigration system is way more complicated than it needs to be), but I'm more wondering: did someone not explain to him what a permanent resident was and what he couldn't do? Or how did this misunderstanding happen? Assuming it was a misunderstanding, that is.

  • Nov 30, 2025 @ 03:01pm

    Okay, so I stupidly was typing this in the subject field... Woops? Anyway. What I was trying to say (in the wrong box!) was that, if my understanding is right, it would make sense that perjury charges weren't brought: ICE or whatever fed agency gets sued, it gets brought to the circuit courts, fed lies, and up to SCOTUS it goes, where the fed lies some more. SCOTUS obviously is never going to refer for prosecution a republican for perjury, so that's out. And the DOJ is never goign to prosecute the administration for perjury as long as this administration holds power, so that's also out. Though I have no idea why perjury charges aren't being brought in the state courts where perjury occurs.

  • Nov 30, 2025 @ 02:56pm

    Don't perjury charges have to be brought by the DOJ? I know that a judge can refer people for charges, but the DOJ or state AGs have to actually bring them from my understanding. If that is true, then it would make sense why no perjury charges have been brought:

    Don't

  • Nov 27, 2025 @ 10:33am

    Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains

  • Nov 27, 2025 @ 06:14am

    Local healthcare providers are advocating for the public to get themselves and their children vaccinated to prevent the spread of the disease...
    But vaccines, man! Vaccines! They're evil! Evil I tell you! They cause autism and all the problems known to mankind, man! Evidence, you say? What evidence? There ain't any need for this evidence thingy! Just trust me, bro! - RFK JR, probably

  • Nov 26, 2025 @ 01:09pm

    Articles 90, 91 and 92 mention the terms "lawful", because orders are presumed to be lawful by default. A servicemember has no time to debate the lawfulness of orders handed down by their superiors. That's the job of the courts. Sure, a servicemember can refuse unlawful orders. But to simplify it down to "it's codified in the law itself" is stretching things, I would think. If a servicemember refuses to execute an order, they risk a 50-50 that the court finds that the order was, in fact, lawful. So I raised this because things are a lot more nuanced/complicated than just "they have a duty to refuse unlawful orders".

  • Nov 25, 2025 @ 04:40pm

    Source for the video: https://youtu.be/TwPLqGkYnBA

  • Nov 25, 2025 @ 04:36pm

    Mark Kelly—former Navy combat pilot, astronaut, sitting United States Senator—stated a simple legal fact on video: members of the US military can refuse illegal orders. Not as opinion. Not as political positioning. As established law codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and affirmed at Nuremberg when “I was following orders” was rejected as defense for war crimes.
    I don't mean to be that pedant guy, but this isn't actually codified anywhere in the UCMJ. All the UCMJ says (in art. 92) is "Any person subject to this chapter who violates or fails to obey any lawful general order or regulation; having knowledge of any other lawful order issued by a member of the armed forces, which it is his duty to obey, fails to obey the order; or is derelict in the performance of his duties; shall be punished as a court-martial may direct." Legal Eagle has quite a long video describing just how nuanced this is. Even (say) murder is nuanced, because you might reasonably say that an officer being ordered to assassinate a civilian is manifestly unlawful, but the text of Art. 118 leaves a lot of wiggle room: "Any person subject to this chapter who, without justification or excuse, unlawfully kills a human being, when such person has a premeditated design to kill; intends to kill or inflict great bodily harm; is engaged in an act which is inherently dangerous to another and evinces a wanton disregard of human life; or is engaged in the perpetration or attempted perpetration of burglary, rape, rape of a child, sexual assault, sexual assault of a child, aggravated sexual contact, sexual abuse of a child, robbery, or aggravated arson; is guilty of murder, and shall suffer such punishment as a court-martial may direct, except that if found guilty under clause (1) or (4), such person shall suffer death or imprisonment for life as a court-martial may direct, unless such person is otherwise sentenced in accordance with a plea agreement entered into between the parties under section 853a of this title (article 53a)." All of this said, there is precedent for disobeying manifestly unlawful orders. But most officers in the military, from my understanding, are not intended to know what and what is not "manifestly unlawful," and the default is to assume that if you are given an order, it is lawful (because it is presumed that your superiors would not give you an order if it were unlawful).

  • Nov 18, 2025 @ 05:10pm

    Shouldn’t it be the individuals who committed the illegal acts who pay damages/go to jail/etc?
    Your thinking like a logical and rational person. The laws that protect these people (and which also punish the taxpayers for this) aren't written by or for logical or rational people.

  • Nov 18, 2025 @ 09:45am

    Damn, you guys beat me to it. I was going to remark about this too.

  • Nov 17, 2025 @ 04:04pm

    ... and expressed efforts to address the issue internally.
    Yeah right. Sure you did. Pull the other one.

  • Nov 17, 2025 @ 04:02pm

    I would like to hope that we will have a much more ruthless democratic administration one of these days. Hopefully one that uses all these weapons Trump has created for himself against the Republican party. If there's one thing these assholes need to learn, it's that when you implement precedent to ignore the law, the other party can do it too.

  • Nov 17, 2025 @ 10:52am

    I agree. I feel like the only way is to pass laws (and maybe even constitutional amendments) which severely lock down the federal government. A lot. I don't really know of any other way to do it, but I'm also not a lawyer. Especially since I don't see how else we could neuter that one political party without doing very very drastic things.

  • Nov 17, 2025 @ 08:55am

    Am I the only one who thinks that after this administration is finally removed (either because it left willingly or because we had to... Convince it to leave), we'll either be removing or rewriting a bunch of rules/regs/laws? Though I have no idea how to balance discretion with legal specificity, sadly.

  • Nov 17, 2025 @ 08:49am

    Completely agree. One of the points a lot of my more center/right-leaning family members like to bring up is that the government's internal systems should talk to each other. Which I would agree to, if it was being done properly/legally. And DOGE weren't the ones doing it. Though the fact that USCIS and SSA don't at least transmit basic information like this is just weird to me. They wouldn't even need to share databases, just basic data about a person. That would at least open up the possibility of automatic SSN issuance...

  • Nov 16, 2025 @ 08:10am

    Yeah, this is definitively true, if my research is true and I haven't found one of those AI slop websites. (I literally found one yesterday, for the first time, on Kagi, so...) Supposedly, USCIS did something to N-400 in 2024 that allowed you to "request" that your citizenship data with the SSA be automatically updated. But, of course, then Trump took office, and such was "suspended" / "temporarily paused". Because of course it was.

  • Nov 16, 2025 @ 08:06am

    Is this actually true? Idk if it is, haven't ever heard of this... But if this is true then yes, there are probably hundreds of thousands to millions who have missed this step. How much you wanna bet that they don't even advertise it very well?

  • Nov 16, 2025 @ 08:03am

    And even if we consider a theoretical reality where they only use that slice of information, that information alone is enough to completely ruin your life and do quite a lot of damage.

More comments from Ethin Probst >>