Literally, officially, it’s now entirely legal under federal law for officials to accept and even solicit bribes for specific services rendered, just so long as they do it after, rather than before, the service is rendered.
They aren’t even pretending to be a legitimate court of law any more - they’re just a rubber-stamping service for the oligarchy.
I would agree that Americans need to make “informed decisions” in the upcoming election - for instance, they need to be “informed” of the fact that one of the candidates is a convicted felon.
And on another note, here’s that “politically motivated” thing again.
Just as I noted the other day, when Alito trotted it out, how is there even a notion that it matters?
Let’s just run with the assumption that the prosecution was “politically motivated.” So what? The trial worked exactly the way a trial is meant to work - the jury heard the evidence and rendered a verdict based on the evidence.
What on earth does the supposed motivation of the prosecutor have to do with anything?
No - it’s actually not like that at all.
Google didn’t pay that money just to bypass the formalities along the way to paying a fixed fine - they paid it in order to head off the possibility that they were going to face a jury trial instead of a bench trial, since juries are far more likely to vote in favor of much bigger fines than judges are.
Mm… no. It’s really not.
The specific point of all of this was that Google wanted to avoid a jury trial, and the specific reason that they wanted to avoid a jury trial is because a jury trial is much more likely to end up with a much bigger judgment against them. A judge in a bench trial will follow established precedent to arrive at a reasonable penalty, while a jury can and often will essentially arbitrarily decide that they should be fined eleventy bajillion dollars for being assholes.
So their goal with this payment was pretty much exactly the same as the goal of the motorist who slips a traffic cop a bribe to get out of a ticket - to entice someone with immediate cash in order to avoid potentially having to pay much more somewhere down the line.
So basically the corporate equivalent of slipping a traffic cop a $100, then him conveniently deciding that you’re free to go.
I don’t think we can say, since it’s possible (likely?) that his premises aren’t even true.
Israel has already trotted out all of the same “mistakes were made” rhetoric, and certainly if they haven’t already, they will state that they’ll try to learn from it to make changes. So there’s really no difference as far as that goes
The biggest difference I see between the incidents is only relevant to Americans - then it was our government controlling the narrative at home, and now it’s a foreign government, failing to control the narrative abroad.
I have little doubt that the narrative about Gaza that Israelis are being fed now is roughly the same as the narrative Americans were being fed about Iraq and Afghanistan, which at least leaves the possibility that the actual underlying realities were and are also roughly the same. And if so, what Kirby is actually doing is not comparing the incidents and responses in and of themselves, but essentially just playing off of the differences between the version the people at home get and the version outsiders get - depending on Americans actually believing the American rhetoric then, even as they don’t believe the Israeli rhetoric now. That’s really the only way you end up with the notion that America sincerely did regret it and admit to it and set about making changes, rather than just, as Israel is doing now (from an outside perspective) paying lip service to all of that.
So what he’s actually possibly demonstrating, certainly inadvertently, is that the US was just as full of shit then as Israel is now.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to be so morally bankrupt.
Clearly, they know that what they’re doing in Gaza is evil, and they know that the only hope they have of evading the entirely justified condemnation of the rest of the world is to hide it.
History will not judge them kindly. No matter what they do, they’re not going to be able to hide the evidence of their evil forever.
No surprise there.
Israel’s actions in Gaza are morally indefensible.
So its defenders cannot, and for the most part don’t even bother to try to, sincerely engage with criticism.
Instead, they rely on diversions, misrepresentations, character assassination, censorship, intimidation, harassment and violence, simply because that’s all they have.
On brand.
No surprise there - she’s a crass opportunist with no principles and no empathy; what else is she going to do?
It’s likely that she isn’t even dissembling - that she’s sincerely defending her actions because she’s so psychologically crippled that she genuinely can’t see how anyone could legitimately take exception to them.
Best of luck to them.
It’s true in essentially all industries, but it’s especially obvious in rideshare that there’s a layer of parasites who get paid far too much money for nothing beyond the fact that they won the fight for the position of “parasite who gets paid far too much money for doing nothing.”
Anything that might even just decrease the number of overpaid parasites would be a benefit not just to the concerned industry, but to society as a whole.
Mmm… yes and no.
College towns are more lively and interesting, and notably more likely to have cultural things that similar-sized other towns don’t have - bookstores, galleries, music venues, museums and the like. That’s appealing.
But there’s a downside to living in a college town as a non-student. The town is mostly geared toward serving the students, and that can get tiresome, since it’s near certain that some significant number of the students are going to be… well… assholes.
Someone elsewhere in the thread mentioned tourist towns and their similar appeal, and I’d agree. But with the exact same proviso.
Which “US pressure” was that? When they vetoed the UN resolution? Or when they bypassed Congress to hand the IDF even more munitions with which to murder even more Palestinians? Or when they did it again, because apparently the IDF wasn’t able to murder enough Palestinians with the arms they’d already gotten?
Sort of like applying “pressure” to a friend to diet by taking them to a buffet and saying, “Eat up! It’s on me!”
And not coincidentally, exactly as effective.
Well yeah - there are other trolls that the media regularly feed, including the felonious Republican frontrunner, and they really need to stop feeding all of them.
But Musk is arguably the most blatant of all of the high profile trolls, and this particular one is blatant even by his already awful standards, thus the singular.
But yeah…
The media need to stop feeding the troll.
I would assume it’s just a compulsion.
Like a compulsive gambler constantly looking for the next thing to bet on, or a compulsive eater looking for the next thing to eat, he’s constantly looking for the next way to dick people over for profit.
Bezos isn’t going to miss a chance to dick people over. Because apparently he’s not rich enough yet.
Imagine what the world would be like if we treated sociopathy as the vividly destructive mental illness it so obviously is, rather than rewarding sociopaths with wealth and power.
I suspect this is damage control - that Israel can no longer pretend that they didn’t know in advance, so they have to pretend that the failure to act to prevent the attack was a mistake, rather than a considered decision made specifically so that Hamas would provide them with an excuse to invade and occupy Gaza.
And I stand by everything I said there.
And I also believe that the threadiverse will continue to grow overall.
And I don’t believe that those two things are in any way contradictory.
Right. Go back and reread it - that’s what I said.