The city is adding a 10 person team of Department of Transportation employees who will target areas of the city with a lot of placard abuse, like lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn. Mayor says it's sometimes awkward for NYPD officers to ticket their own.
SDNY is a busy place!
A second grand jury has been convened in the Southern District of New York, based on investigations by the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/r-kelly-is-now-the-subject-of-multiple-criminal-investigations
*groans and rubs temples* not sure which is worse, how stupid that is or how we probably saw that stupid coming for several miles
but in lighter news
BREAKING: Melbourne rampage killer James Gargasoulas has been sentenced to life for the death of six pedestrians, with a minimum of 46 years before he can apply for parole http://bit.ly/2GDWSI4
@Wipqozn That's not what I mean. You need to have standards or rules for deciding what speech is allowed. "Hateful" is ambiguous and interpreted inconsistently. So, what I'm asking is what kind of consistently enforceable rule would ban that kind of speech?
@murgatroid99 Ah, okay, I see what you're saying. In which case I'm just gonna say that's not a discussion I feel like getting into with any depth at the moment. I suspect, though, that it's not something we'd see eye to eye on anyways. Not to assume, but I figure you're much more against any kind of restriction of speech on a fundamental level than I am, based on other conversations you've had in the past.
I mean I might totally be done with discussing it more if I wasn't planning to head to bed shortly (which is to say whenever I tear myself away from anno).
@murgatroid99 To be honest I'm not sure, especially since I know there are some province-to-province variations of it.
I am generally opposed to speech restriction, but I wouldn't really be opposed to implementing existing tried-and-true hate speech legislation from a country like Canada as rules on those sites.
But reading that article, it's not any clearer to me what that law considers to be "inciting hatred"
To be honest it's not even that specific tweet of hers, it's just her in general. Her entire purpose in life, as far as I can tell (in my likely confirmation biased sources) is to just try to spread hate.
She wouldn't be able to do that if folks would just stop giving her a platform,
Right, but my point here is if her statements wouldn't even violate the hate speech laws you reference, what kind of stronger standard would you want those sites to apply?
@murgatroid99 So I'm by no means an expert, but from what I understand Canadian laws tend to be more about the spirit of the law than the letter of the law (when compared to the USA), so I think our laws often a lot less detailed as you'd probably be used to in the US. But again I'm by no means an expert on that, so take it with a grain of salt.
My overall point is that it seems to me that it's possible for someone to be a generally hateful person without necessarily saying anything direct or specific enough to get them in trouble with existing hate speech rules, and I think it would be very difficult for platforms to put good rules into place that would also effectively deal with those people.
And I don't want to spend any longer on her Twitter feed but it seems to me that Ann Coulter is one of those people
@murgatroid99 So one of the reasons I didn't really want to discuss it too much, aside from the fact I'm exiting soon, is just that "defining hatred" and "when does it cross the line?" isn't something I've put enough thought into that I could really properly put it into words, especially not to the level of detail I you'd be comfortable with.
@murgatroid99 Well what I've seen of her over the years has led me to believe she's not one of those people, and that she very clearly crosses the line into "spreading hate". But I can't really drag up specific examples, because it's not like I've made a point to follow her, I just constantly see stuff she's said over the years.
Although again when we're talking about specific laws you could be very well be right, but also private companies shouldn't be held to the same standard as governments. Twitter is under no obligation to give people a platform.
But Twitter isn't one person. They can't have one decider looking at every account and making a yes/no decision. They need policies for making that decision. And I think it would be very hard to make a policy that is broad enough to hit generically hateful people without also doing too much collateral damage.
But on the other hand it's apparently super easy to have an explicit policy categorizing intentionally misgendering people as abusive and yet they don't even enforce that one. Somebody at twitter has been making a call that actually this rule is fake if you're a british man named graham with a blue checkmark
Which could be any number of people in my "we have received your report" box but not in my "an update on the account you reported" box
@murgatroid99 Some of my stance on this is derived from what I've seen happen on platforms in the past ~5 years, especially REddit. Where groups such as stormfront actively target it as a way to spread hate and bigotry and grow their numbers. They do so since it's a platform filled with kids (<18) who are very impressionable.
Twitter also makes the explicit decision that content that must be legally withheld in Germany is allowed on their website at all. They just follow the statutory requirements on that and call it a day.
@TimStone This reminded me of that horrifying video of a a guy on a Russian road where suddenly a brick flies off an oncoming truck, crashes through the windshield and crushes the head of the passenger
Went down the rabbit hole of another of city-owned land sale in Philadelphia. Seemed only mildly interesting at first. The numbers looked off ... then things got really weird ... https://www.philly.com/news/philadelphia-real-estate-sales-shawn-bullard-darrell-clarke-temple-20190222.html 👇
@emptywheel Also:
"Baylor University President Ken Starr and his wife, Alice, lobbied for a Virginia school administrator who admitted to molesting five children under the age of 14 to be sentenced to community service rather than jail time."
https://www.wacotrib.com/news/higher_education/starr-pushed-for-lighter-sentence-for-convicted-va-child-molester/article_56d5c672-febc-5dac-9165-83c41758ce44.html
> On Wednesday, Vice News reported that at least six jurors ignored Cogan’s orders, perusing social media, surfing the Internet and discussing the discovered information.
An op-ed from @RepAdamSchiff:
The time for silent disagreement is over. Republicans must speak out against President Trump. https://wapo.st/2E5XqCv
I fully expect it to fall on deaf ears, but this is a strong statement:
> To my Republican colleagues: When the president attacked the independence of the Justice Department by intervening in a case in which he is implicated, you did not speak out. When he attacked the press as the enemy of the people, you again were silent. When he targeted the judiciary, labeling judges and decisions he didn’t like as illegitimate, we heard not a word. And now he comes for Congress, the first branch of government, seeking to strip it of its greatest power, that of the purse.
> Many of you have acknowledged your deep misgivings about the president in quiet conversations over the past two years. You have bemoaned his lack of decency, character and integrity. You have deplored his fundamental inability to tell the truth. But for reasons that are all too easy to comprehend, you have chosen to keep your misgivings and your rising alarm private.
> That must end. The time for silent disagreement is over. You must speak out.
> “I thought we would get arrested,” the juror said. “I thought they were going to hold me in contempt.… I didn't want to say anything or rat out my fellow jurors. I didn't want to be that person. I just kept it to myself, and I just kept on looking at your Twitter feed.”
If the judge was going to hold you in contempt then, they're most definitely going to hold you in contempt now.
@Frank for some definition of "get his way". Several lawsuits have been filed already; and I heard one report that 2 of the 3 purported sources of funds might be yankable by Congress even now
To be clear, a lawyer I respect says that the ultimate question of what the president can declare as an "emergency" is likely non-justicable (the courts will defer to the executive), but there are a few other matters that are more likely to succeed
(eminent domain, whether the wall actually count as "infrastucture support of the military", whether the proper environmental studies have been done per the law)
@InvaderSkoodge they sponsored some smash ultimate cpu tournament video and I was so confused because they spent the entire match referring to "the skillshare kirby" and I THOUGHT IT WAS A GAME FEATURE BUT NO IT'S THAT KIRBY'S SPONSOR
The likely scenario is that McConnell uses all of the time at his disposal to convince Trump to rescind the order somehow, but Trump doesn't give af so gl buddy
@PrivatePansy You should submit that for those Polygon videos
🚨 EXCLUSIVE:
(Bloomberg) -- New York state prosecutors have put together a criminal case against Paul Manafort that they could file quickly if the former chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign receives a presidential pardon.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-22/new-york-is-said-to-prep-manafort-charges-if-trump-pardons-him
@gregfarrel
@Wipqozn Yup, forced arbitration in the US for either employment or for products means you forfeit your right to sue. You must present your case against the company to an supposedly independent arbitrator (who is in fact hired by the company to handle such cases).
You will be shocked to learn that arbitrators rule in favor of the company more than 90% of the time!
I thought the frustration before was forcing people who have been harassed to go through what is effectively just an HR process with the harasser. which is still bad, but not as bad as I'd expect given the response to it.
I phrased that weirdly, but yeah. Now I get why the response to this from folks was so strong. Much worse problem than I originally thought.
because even though your claim may be a couple hundred dollars in total or something (idk what the "average" case looks like), multiply that by the boss is doing this to every single worker and wew
I think there are a bunch of Uber drivers doing this in CA, but, lucky for them, the state of California requires the employer to cover all costs in arbitration. So even just filing a few thousand independent claims is costing the company a lot
(he made some dumb ruling like "we can't pick and choose which laws we want", and then immediately decided that the federal arbitration act allowing forced arbitration trumped the national labor relations act allowing collective worker action)
(other justices were like "wait hang on we can reconcile this by saying that yeah you can do forced arbitration but you can't disallow class action and bam we've married these two laws" in dissent but alas,)
@SaintWacko Extremely same, in terms of having a day of cleaning up dumb things and decisions at work and then having delicious bulgogi for lunch. Mine was a burrito.