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Also, the woman who recorded the aftermath of the shooting got fired from her job because people were calling them about her so they were all "meh, not our problem".

And for some reason, stripped her of her professional credentials? I feel like she could fight that part at least.

Even worse...

The witness has been identified only as Bunny and has stated that she recorded Guyger on her cellphone after hearing the fatal shots and Botham asking Guyger why did you shoot me. That video was seized by prosecutors and has not been seen by the public. In addition, she was placed under a gag order by the prosecution and cannot discuss the details of the video in public.

There's an awful lot of America's corruption that stays bottled up and behind closed doors. I wonder if the reason we haven't seen any attempt to clean up this corruption is that any attempt to start clearing it would - by its very nature - reveal that corruption to the masses, and thus lead to a startlingly similar situation. How patriotic would you feel if you knew about how your defense dollars are spent? Or how many decisions in the past twenty years that were made as ostensibly moral choices, but instead were to increase tax revenue? Or, even, how congressmen and senators choose to spend their money? Or where the majority of their money comes from?

I don't think corruption has been hidden from the masses in the USA for a long time. 

• We've had the Bush and Trump administration's flagrant, obvious, well-known corruption, with egregious consequences to life and liberty
• 13 years of Wikileaks
• the Snowden leaks
• the Panama papers
• like a dozen attempts to pass internet censorship laws hidden from the public behind national security classification (SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, COICA, etc)
• and a general avalanche of investigative journalism and research blatantly revealing how everything (environment, food industry, finance, inequality, medicine, etc) is fucked to extremes and it's all because of corruption

I stopped expecting information to be enough to motivate people several years ago.  It's going to take direct, immediate, tangible threat to the well-being of the majority of people for them to finally be ready to act.  And I don't mean something abstract like the impending threat of environmental apocalypse.  I mean the hammers battering down their doors.  I genuinely think that the media has conditioned everyone to be looking for their cue to be something out of an action movie.

Quote from: Ispil on October 02, 2019, 10:26:26 pm

Indeed; as for the legal classification, it's murder. Second degree murder, but murder nonetheless (it'd be hard to prove that she premeditated this specific murder given the clusterfuck of circumstances, but it's clear as day that when she pulled that trigger she shot to kill- hell, it is standard training for police, after all).

Second degree murder, then (I was wondering whether it might count as manslaughter but I know I don't know the details which determine that).
I was only protesting that it obviously wasn't premeditated.

And was imagining myself in her shoes, having lived in identical damn homes and approached identical looking doors, and I didn't get to the point where I tried a handle which happened to be open (for some reason??  I'm not implying, it's just weird!  Weren't they electronic locks??) and to be confronted with a stranger in my living space when I, in this situation, live a live of making enemies?

And in such a situation I carry a firearm offduty because fuck, I know *I* would, if I was a cop.  People fucking hate cops.  And here's someone waiting for me in the ONE place I can unwind.

Like I commented on the video I linked, I like to think I'd flee.
Distance, time, cover.  Re-evaluate.

To draw a firearm at someone is to be ready to kill them.  To be sure.
She wasn't sure, she shouldn't have drawn
And that means that some people carrying personal defense weapons are going to die to ambushes, if they do what's right.
It's still right.

Have some fucking empathy, people.

I am charitable.  I don't always reject arguments in defense of police that reference their training, split-second decisions, panic, etc.  These are valid concerns.  It is a stretch, but not outside the realm of possibility that a decent person could have done something like this.

But where police are concerned, it's not a simple thing to be charitable.

The history of police impunity makes it really hard.  Not every officer is responsible for this.  Not every officer takes advantage of it.  But when something bad happens, it's impossible not to consider that reliance of police impunity in the justice system may have been a factor in their decision making.

The history of police organizations kicking out officers who act in good conscious or try to improve internal culture makes it really hard.  It's hard to grant the charitable assumption that a decent person may have made an honest mistake, when that person is part of an organization that often actively weeds out decent people.

And in this specific case, her personal history makes it really difficult.  In regards to pre-meditation, it is too aggressive an assumption that she pre-meditated this specific event.  But she proudly associated herself violent memes that specifically reference shooting first on a public platform, along with probably harboring racist sentiments.  So while she likely didn't pre-meditate this specific act, it could be said that she was pre-meditated to react in this specific way in the event of being startled by a black person.

You likely would have fled and composed yourself, because your words in this thread indicate you have practiced the exact opposite style of mental preparation that she did.  So her own behaviors, independent even of her association with the police, undermine the amount of charity I'm willing to grant her vs anybody else.  I know people in real life who are gun-obsessed, sorta racist, and like to proliferate similar memes, but aren't police officers.  If one of them ever ended up in court for similar reasons, it would impact my judgment of them in the same way.

Quote from: lemon10 on September 29, 2019, 11:43:44 pm

Quote from: Lord Shonus on September 29, 2019, 11:33:57 pm

Counterpoint:

Quote from: The Constitution of The United States (Article III, Section 3)

1: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Well since Donald Trump is the president, he is basically America. Anyone that attacks him in any way is his enemy, and thus America's enemy. So, presuming that someone gives aid or comfort to themselves (eg. by taking a nice nap or by making a meal for yourself) they are, by the constitution committing treason.
Checkmate Lord Shonus. 

Are you joking? The President is not the country. The country consists of three branches, Legislative, Executive, and Juidiciary. And the civilian population. If someone tells the other two branches and the civilian population about the illegal acts of one of the branches, it’s not treason, it’s letting the rest of the country know about a corrupted branch on the tree.

Yes, they were joking.

the american intelligence apparatus has shown itself to be increasingly incapable of doing anything but gathering information on its own citizens and stopping the one terrorist that attempts an attack every other year or so.

It's almost as if counter-terrorism was only ever a shallow pretense for propping up status quo defense against anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist sentiment.  Almost. 

If only there were historical examples of these organizations taking extra-legal action against activists and public figures, which demonstrated clear political bias.  Or maybe if there were any investigative journalism exploring the application of post-911 counter-terrorism apparatus on recent activist movements such as Occupy.  If only.

A couple things to keep in mind about Trump's base, since the nature of his popular support keeps coming up:

The far-right reactionaries only love a winner.  Hierarchy of winners and losers is baked deeply into their perception of the world.  Someone like Trump succeeds at presenting the confidence and skin-deep trappings of being a winner, and they'll get behind it.  The power in this is so long as Trump maintains this superficiality, reality can't touch him in the minds of his supporters.  The weakness in this is that as soon as any crack appears in that perception, that power will collapse quickly.  So long as he's in office and free to say whatever he wants, he's in the most powerful position of control over the narrative regarding his presidency, and can maintain the perception of being a winner.  Constantly complaining about how he doesn't respect the legal constraints and traditions of his office even works to his favor on this point, because it grants him an "above-it-all" winning appearance so long as he suffers no consequences.  But I think it might be harder for him to position himself for the same narrative control through impeachment proceedings.  The real threat of suffering consequences damages that "above-it-all" perception.  And as soon as it begins to look like there's a chance he could be impeached, I think you'll see his supporters turn on him hard.

Second, conservative loyalty only goes so far as it's useful to them.  Remember how quickly they turned on Bush Jr after he left office?  He'd served his purpose, and there was no benefit to invest energy in sticking up for him anymore.  By 2009, I hardly ever saw a single word in defense of him.  They'll stand by their man in the spotlight.  But as soon as they're out of the spotlight, it's easier to absolve oneself of association, lighten the baggage of the movement by leaving as much negative legacy behind with that individual, and move on to the next prospect of power.

JIT is seriously shitty.  Perfect territory for pulling examples of how the incentives of capitalism lead to stupid, wasteful, inefficient behaviors.

I work in freight forwarding and the customer I've mainly worked with ships a lot of audio & infomedia unit components for the automotive industry.  It's often completely fucking bonkers out of control stuff.  We're talking insanely expensive emergency shipments happening on a daily basis to prevent factory shutdowns.  I've seen some ridiculously extreme measures take place.  Like proposals to fly a helicopter out to a container ship to pull out a few small boxes, attempts to stop trains, 300 kg of cargo strapped to handcarts and checked in on passenger planes as baggage by teams of couriers, planes chartered for $50k+ to save an hour or two on moving 100 kg of stuff a couple hundred miles.

It's mainly about cost-cutting pressures, and the asymmetrical leverage involved in the supply chain business contracts.  Suppliers are often forced to promise delivery windows as narrow as a specific hour as condition for doing business, and if the factory shuts down because the supplier doesn't fulfill that promise, then it's the supplier who ends up contractually obligated to absorb those losses.  And the blame/cost-shifting chain doesn't necessarily stop there, but you get the idea.  And every step of the way is lubricated by salespeople who don't know how things really work pitching unrealistic promises to executives who don't know how things really work.  So while this supply chain model is highly disruptive to their productivity and real societal utility, it's not actually much financial risk for the end-product businesses who are making the decision to use it.  They're saving money.  Losses are externalized to smaller fish several steps removed in the chain of business relationships.

The one valid argument I've heard for it is that automotive production cycles are so small that inventory becomes obsolete too quickly to take advantage of warehoused parts.  Every make/model is re-designed every year, and only in production for a few months before everything gets re-tooled for the next iteration.  So given that, it's internally logical to avoid keeping extra parts on hand that will go obsolete and have to be liquidated so soon.  To micromanage exact quantities on tight schedules instead.  But the broader view is that it's just another layer of insanity that there's so much pressure to iterate so quickly and cause so much waste.  We could materially do so much better by slowing down and maybe making larger leaps less often, involving people with operational knowledge in decision making, and approaching business relationships more cooperatively.  But that approach isn't geared towards quarterly number drives.

At this point, we’d have an easier time trying to adapt than completely reversing global warming.

Again, global warming is just one of several equally serious environmental issues that need to be faced.  We could solve global warming tomorrow.  Pollution and habitat destruction would still do us in.  We need to stop thinking of environmental disaster as synonymous with global warming.  Even if we could adapt to that one thing, we can't adapt to the cumulative effect of all of them.  We need some functional ecosystem to sustain us.