Scary Devil Monastery 's Techdirt Comments

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• On the post: Judge Dumps Felony Manslaughter Charges Brought Against An Arrestee After A Deputy Ran Over Another Deputy

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 28 Oct, 2021 @ 04:02am

  Re: Re: Re: Re:

  [Addendum] Oh, and here's a perfect example. Partaking in a violent riot in the Capitol on jan 6th. Everyone involved should have known that storming a federal facility while chanting about hanging the US VP might result in death. Felony Murder charge for every participant based on the officers who died, hm? What I usually find laughable about oh-so-many self-styled "conservatives" is their lack of self-awareness. That law will almost never be used against the getaway driver conspiring with someone to burglar some old pensioner's house. It will be used - indeed, probably is used, right now - to grab anyone who could be identified as present on jan 6th and inform them they can play ball or cop 20 to life on Felony Murder or similar rubberstamp bullshit...for getting caught on camera posing with the confederate flag in the middle of the building where a cop had been killed.

• On the post: Judge Dumps Felony Manslaughter Charges Brought Against An Arrestee After A Deputy Ran Over Another Deputy

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 28 Oct, 2021 @ 03:51am

  Re: Re: Re:

  "Yes, he agreed to be the getaway driver to someone who was a murderer, someone who he either knew to be a murderer or should have known to be a murderer..." You mean he's assumed to be psychic? What he agreed to is to be the getaway driver of someone burglaring a house. That means a number of actionable charges - conspiracy to commit burglary. possibly reckless endangerment. But western legal principle relies on intent. If someone is the cause of a death without intent to kill the charge is manslaughter. If someone attacks someone else with intent to kill the charge is murder. If a third party holds the coat of the perpetrator then the charge is abetment. "When you plan crimes with another person and the results are less than ideal, you don't get to say "but geez, we expected to be able to commit our inherently violent crime of invading an inhabited residence without anyone dying!"." That is sort of the exact meaning of good law, yes. Because the other sort of law would similarly allow you to pin a murder on someone who was not a part of either murder nor violence. This is why conspiracy and abetting and assisting exist. Here's a point you may want to consider; Given your argument any police officer riding into a possible flashpoint situation can and should then be charged with Felony Murder if their colleague loses his shit and guns someone down. "Or at least people who aren't foolish millennials who want to tear everything down because they can't be bothered to expend the effort to understand it." Says the benighted lackwit whose assumed greater age hasn't brought him the wisdom to realize that it's not a good law if it can be used to pin a murder charge on police officers, rescue workers, or doctors and nurses if ANY associated personnel present happens to lose their shit and kill someone deliberately. Good law works like this; intent combined with criminal act produces charge. "Felony murder statutes are designed to be abused." Fixed that for you. You'd think a "conservative" would value stringent legal principle.

• On the post: Judge Dumps Felony Manslaughter Charges Brought Against An Arrestee After A Deputy Ran Over Another Deputy

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 28 Oct, 2021 @ 03:39am

  Re: Re: Wut?

  "Under its intended usage..." <reads the OP again> My point stands. The intended usage of a law is a very low bar of standards. That this got as far as a courtroom in the first place is a shit-show of piss-poor jurisprudens. "...felony murder is NOT "the person's presence at a crime scene makes them as culpable as someone who actually committed the crime."" Since it can be interpreted this way and effectively used this way then it certainly is. "Whether or not you agree with the assertion that felony murder is bad doctrine, this is a strawman. This isn't what felony murder does." Said strawman walked this case all the way before a judge. That this took bad faith by police officers and the prosecutor both could be considered less relevant. If you tried to drag this sort of bullshit in front of a judge I'd expect said judge to seriously sanction the prosecutor over blatant ineptitude and/or malice. "Felony murder says that if you engage in dangerous, illegal activities, then you do so knowing that someone could very well die in the commission of said activities." ...and that's a bullshit charge to begin with, unbacked by most principles of western law. Last I checked, intent is still the criteria by which you can assign culpability. When you engage in dangerous and illegal activity then that dangerous and illegal activity is what you should be charged with. Felony murder is an attempt of overlexification. A way to take any bullshit charge and amplify it until it hits someone who wasn't related to the more severe felony in the first place. With the possible intent to use as plea bargain material. "But the act of entering a bank with a gun with the intent to point it at people and threaten them assumes the risk that someone is going to end up dead." You mean reckless endangerment, conspiracy to commit grand theft and manslaughter? Discrete and precise charges fulfilling all criteria of good jurisprudens? Leaving the murderer to face the charges for murder? No, this is just one more way in which the US proves it can not keep and maintain sensible and proportional legislation, instead going the distance to sidestep burden of proof and intent by tacking on rubberstamp legislation applied only by vested interest. Recall that Chauvin was merely convicted of "second degree unintentional murder", "third degree murder" and "second degree manslaughter". His associates are going down for "aiding and abetting". Where's the "Felony Murder" charge of helping an associate slowly choking someone to death while checking the pulse has ceased on the victim? The intended usage of a number of american laws is quote obvious - it's meant to amplify any given charge beyond reasonable proportion at the complete discretion of the prosecutor. That being the case it's both a crappy law and yes, nailing someone for a crime they took no intentional part in is exactly what that law does.

• On the post: Judge Dumps Felony Manslaughter Charges Brought Against An Arrestee After A Deputy Ran Over Another Deputy

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 28 Oct, 2021 @ 03:09am

  Re: Re: Re: 'Next up an assault charge for forcing me to beat th

  Go google "Henry Davis Ferguson". You will find a case where a number of officers charged a black man with willfull destruction of government property for bleeding on their uniforms. An assault which by the statement of the officers in question took place in a cellblock in the precinct lockup, when the cameras didn't record. Henry Davis spitefully inflicted a number of aggravated injuries on himself and started bleeding all over the kind officers who tried to pacify him. And then maliciously slandered those officers by claiming they'd dragged him into a cell and started beating him up. /s before someone mistakes me for Restless94110 or Shel10.

• On the post: Judge Dumps Felony Manslaughter Charges Brought Against An Arrestee After A Deputy Ran Over Another Deputy

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 28 Oct, 2021 @ 03:04am

  Re: Re: Definition

  "One must a co-conspiritor in the initial felony, to which the murder is a connected incident. E.g. a bank robbery's get-away driver is bound by conspiracy to a murder committed by their co-conspirators in the commission of the conspired robbery." False premise. For conspiracy to apply the person charged must have been involved in the planning of the crime. That is manifestly not the case if the one guy robbing the bank shot someone on the spur of the moment while the driver was sitting in the car. The driver in that example could be charged with conspiracy over the bank robbery - that was planned. Not the spontaneous murder. The principle of law is pretty clear. There must be intent. If you can charge people with crimes they neither intended to commit nor committed then we're already at so low a standard of law that Russia and China come off as paragons of good jurisprudens in comparison. This seems to be a recurring problem in the US of today - "law" is increasingly a matter of perspective and fuzzy logic rather than a sanction against manifest fact of action and intent. At that point it isn't law any longer. It's the monopoly of violence assuming a Might gives Right philosophy.

• On the post: Court: Congressional Reps Making Noise About Social Media Moderation Doesn't Make Platforms Extensions Of The Government

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 28 Oct, 2021 @ 02:55am

  Re: Re: Congressional Shit Show

  "...and let's face it, anything 100% uncensored would quickly devolve into another sewer." And yet it might be, at this point, worth the attempt just to provide a case study for the deliberately slow of wit that no, moderation is very much essential for any social platform. It's like keeping a bar. If you have no rules at all then 99% of patrons may be maintaining some standard of personal decency but there'll always be that 1% who'll regularly shit on the floor - which means the 99% will avoid that bar henceforth.

• On the post: Court: Congressional Reps Making Noise About Social Media Moderation Doesn't Make Platforms Extensions Of The Government

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 28 Oct, 2021 @ 02:52am

  Re: Re: 'Uncle Saaaaam, the popular platforms were mean to me!'

  It was ironic and amusing the first few years that the biggest beneficiaries of american socialist systems - social aid, food stamps, subsidized healthcare etc. - kept screaming about the evils of socialism...
  ...but by now it's just embarrassing to have to own up to being the same species as these lackwits. Honestly, as long as those benighted morons keep sticking around the US remains a lost cause. Unfortunately to the dems it's still business as usual which means come 2022 and 2024 there's still good odds the winning candidate will be Trump or some similar strongman able to keep a straight face while bullshitting everyone.

• On the post: Court: Congressional Reps Making Noise About Social Media Moderation Doesn't Make Platforms Extensions Of The Government

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 28 Oct, 2021 @ 02:10am

  Re:

  "Democrat politicians: We want you to take down anything we disagree with!" And since by "anything" you guys usually mean nazism, racism, long rants about the liberal cannibal cult and other Qanon gibberish, or an attempt to get more people killed by trying to explain away medical science... ...I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the whole world is with the democrats on that one. The fact that a small, utterly vile minority feels butthurt and infringed upon when they aren't allowed to spout KKK slogans in other people's living rooms isn't really relevant. Nor is it in any way weird or strange when sane people ask to have such asshats banned from the forums they frequent, nor that some such sane people happen to be democrats.

• On the post: Judge Says Devin Nunes' Family Has To Tell The Judge Who Is Funding Their Lawsuit Against Esquire & Ryan Lizza

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 28 Oct, 2021 @ 02:04am

  Re: Smile For The Camera

  Please, just stop lowing about it already. Nunes cow has dropped enough patties in enough courtrooms by now I think.

• On the post: Judge Says Devin Nunes' Family Has To Tell The Judge Who Is Funding Their Lawsuit Against Esquire & Ryan Lizza

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 28 Oct, 2021 @ 02:03am

  Re: Re: Re:

  "The GOP is basically the Tesla of clown car makers at this point." I beg to differ. Clowns need to, at least in some respect, be funny. Most of the GOP are only funny if you're a five year old who'd find it funny to see someone shitting themselves in public. Pagliacci, they're not.

• On the post: Donald Trump Asserts Fair Use, 'Absolute Immunity' In Lame Attempt To Evade Copyright Suit By Eddy Grant

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 27 Oct, 2021 @ 07:52am

  Re: This is exactly what copyright was designed for

  "This is exactly what copyright was designed for, a textbook case." No, that's the hyped presentation of copyright. I don't think anyone since the days of queen Anne has been gullible enough to actually believe in that portrayal of it. Not even the founding fathers, some of whom had grave reservations around the utility of it. What copyright usually does is it allows stakeholders to gouge massive numbers of individuals for minor sums and encourages copyright trolling while at the same time not often providing leverage against any defendant with actual legal muscle. Instead, if the goal is for an artist not to have their work associated with certain politics or commercial interests, I'd advocate fitting what is currently copyright under Trademark law instead. That's where you'll get the focus on public plagiarization, wrongful commercialization and abuse of the artists brand.
  Sure, Trademark law can and will be abused. But compared to the unholy dumpster fire which is copyright that's still like choosing between a serious case of bubonic plague or a serious case of head cold.

• On the post: Donald Trump Asserts Fair Use, 'Absolute Immunity' In Lame Attempt To Evade Copyright Suit By Eddy Grant

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 27 Oct, 2021 @ 06:44am

  Re: Re: You REALLY are in so tight propaganda bubble that don't

  "I don't know how old you are..." Old "Baghdad Bob" used to comment exactly like this way back on Torrentfreak well over ten years ago and used to go ballistic here on TD in that same period. Hell, he used to come in swinging defending Cheney. So he's old enough he should really know better. Sadly if we've learned anything about him it would be that he's unable to view reality enough to learn from it.

• On the post: Donald Trump Asserts Fair Use, 'Absolute Immunity' In Lame Attempt To Evade Copyright Suit By Eddy Grant

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 27 Oct, 2021 @ 06:26am

  Re: Re: Re: Re:

  From what I recall of New York when I visited - way before even 9/11 - the city was way less hostile - not to mention way less dumb - than what I keep seeing and hearing now. Back then Trump was a joke, falling out of suckers willing to trust him with their money but not quite a full-time WWW or reality TV celeb. And NYC residents prided themselves on not taking wooden nickles. These days it's what, 25% or so of New Yorkers all suddenly dumber than bags of hammers and are willing to hand over their life savings and the lives of their relatives to honor Dear Leader. WTF happened?!

• On the post: Two Years Later, Judge Finally Realizes That A CDN Provider Is Not Liable For Copyright Infringement On Websites

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 27 Oct, 2021 @ 06:18am

  Re: Re:

  "The way Copyright is written and executed now is far from the constitutional intent, making it downright unconstitutional." Something of which at least Jeffersson was aware is that Copyright can not be properly added to a constitution valuing freedoms without causing conflict. Copyright in itself means a third party gets to tell you what you can and can not do with physical property in your possession based on whether the shape of that property can be interpreted to carry information someone else came up with. Or in another way of putting it, copyright is what we normally call information control, just that the censorship is in the hands of private rather than governmental entities. A prohibition on anyone to pass on the interesting stories they've heard. I don't think it's possible at all to add copyright into any national charter which also values freedom of speech and I think the founding fathers all knew this which is why the constitution specifies that congress may protect intellectual property. It's the only optional clause i remember from that document. And we've already seen plenty of examples where copyright has lent itself amicably to abuse.
  Erdogan of Turkey doesn't want his bloopers to go the rounds on Facebook and his supreme court won't let him use heavy-handed censorship? Copyright was the answer and no western nation could so much as squeak when he used a US DMCA law to pull the plug on social media.
  A West German government agency doesn't want to comply with an information request from a civil rights NGO? Copyright was the answer which let them ignore every demand on government transparency. Copyright is a fucking abomination which does not fulfill any of the proposed advantages promised back in the 17th century but which does set us back centuries when it comes to the transparency and accountability we expect from the body politic. In addition to wasting massive public resources on wrecking the functionality of every mass communications medium and information storage invention.

• On the post: Two Years Later, Judge Finally Realizes That A CDN Provider Is Not Liable For Copyright Infringement On Websites

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 27 Oct, 2021 @ 04:14am

  Re: CDN?

  CDN = Content Delivery Network. i.e. any distributed network which will deliver content for hire. Cloudflare is a typical example though push comes to shove, so is the Bittorrent P2P Protocol. I admit to some bias here; I firmly believe any use of an acronym needs to have the full wording spelled out the first time it's used in any given work, against a three strike principle of, at a third offense, taking a hammer to the authors fingers in a kindly and educational fashion.

• On the post: Trump's Broken Social Media Venture Is Valued At Billions Of Dollars And Its Breaking Experts' Brains

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 27 Oct, 2021 @ 02:30am

  Re: Re: The foundation of stocks

  Well yeah. The official version of this is called "trusts". Alas Wall street knows damn well how to put a price tag on that as well. They only get heart attacks when people for some odd reason or other decide to play the same game, as with Gamestop. After all, if a cadre of brokers have a good thing going manipulating the price of overvalued stock it's really like pissing in their cheetos when some facebook, reddit or twitter group decides to indulge in the same type of manipulation, to their great detriment.

• On the post: Trump's Broken Social Media Venture Is Valued At Billions Of Dollars And Its Breaking Experts' Brains

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 27 Oct, 2021 @ 02:01am

  Re: Re: Re: Re:

  The Confederate Reich of America might be a suitable name for that new union. I say let them. But wall the damn thing in afterwards. Hell, I'm sure Mexico will actually pay for a wall in that case.

• On the post: Judge Dumps Felony Manslaughter Charges Brought Against An Arrestee After A Deputy Ran Over Another Deputy

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 27 Oct, 2021 @ 01:54am

  Re: I can see that Felony murder is a bad idea, but there is wor

  It's bad enough to stand out. Honestly, can you imagine the US ambassador irately telling China and Russia about the absurdity of charging dissenters with terrorist activity when all Putin and the Pooh Bear need to do is to quietly point at US law charging an unrelated suspect with murder over one police officer killed another at the time said suspect was in their custody? Ah, the "leader" of the free world keeps setting such glorious examples of standards to aspire to. Proportionate incarceration? The US leads most any other nation.
  Racism? The US leads over most other nations in any kpi.
  Police brutality? The US leads over any nation not in the third world and over many of those who are.
  Proportionate poverty and food insecurity? The US had to redefine poverty standards to claim an "average".
  Worker's rights? Behind most other places.
  Health care and life expectancy? Bad and declining sharply. And most of the declining curves lead back to Reagan who in one fell stroke cut short the golden age of the american dream which was the legacy of FDR.

• On the post: Judge Dumps Felony Manslaughter Charges Brought Against An Arrestee After A Deputy Ran Over Another Deputy

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 27 Oct, 2021 @ 01:32am

  Re: Not So Bizzare

  "These felony murder rules can be an important tool in certain situations, such as swatting." In much the same way that ethnic cleansing can be an important tool for civic order, you mean? This is a law which allows courts to charge a person for a crime they neither committed, abetted, or had agency in. In the example in the op a suspect was charged with murder because one policeman killed another. Except for the sanity of the judge that's fully on par with some chinese or russian judge telling a dissenter they're guilty of terrorism because they publicly spoke out against the government and are thus linked to the mad bomber hitting that city block earlier that day. You bringing one single example where this law was abused to render an appropriate result is like pointing at someone who, after gunning wildly into a crowd, among the dozen victims hit one pickpocket, and then declare "See? It's a good thing that gunman did!". But dare I state I'm not surprised to see your love of law not extending to...eh, a love of actual law.

• On the post: Judge Dumps Felony Manslaughter Charges Brought Against An Arrestee After A Deputy Ran Over Another Deputy

  

  Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 27 Oct, 2021 @ 01:26am

  Wut?

  "It works like this. Two people perform a robbery. One waits in the car. The person inside the business kills someone during the robbery. Prosecutors charge the driver with "felony murder" because they can, arguing that the person's presence at a crime scene makes them as culpable as the person who actually committed the crime."

  I think whatever vestiges of respect I had left for the US system of "justice" just evaporated. THIS dumpster fire is what is to be held up against Russia and China as an example? An example of what, how to shit on every principle of good jurisprudens and drop a murder charge on someone who could very well be utterly ignorant and without agency in the crime committed?

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