“The Onion” Files a Supreme Court Brief

(nytimes.com)

439 points | by fortran77 541 days ago

29 comments

  • cabaalis 541 days ago
    From https://reason.com/2022/09/28/a-parodist-asks-scotus-to-let-... :

    > Eleven Facebook users called the police department's nonemergency line about Novak's spoof, which was the basis for the claim that he had disrupted police operations. When the case was presented to a grand jury, Detective Thomas Connor claimed the callers "honest to God believed" that Novak's creation was the department's official page. But when Novak sued Connor and six other officers, the Institute for Justice notes in its Supreme Court petition, "Connor admitted at deposition that none of the callers thought that."

    I'm pretty sure we all know why this person was arrested, and that there is only one way the court should rule.

    • jkestner 541 days ago
      Unfortunately, this case isn't about whether the police did something wrong, but about the principle of qualified immunity that the Supreme Court created, and has now become de facto law. The best outcome we're likely to get is that the court will rule that the police department's actions do not fall under qualified immunity, and the city's taxpayers will pay for the damages awarded.
      • SamBam 541 days ago
        I'm clearly just an idiot, but I thought that qualified immunity was to protect officials from liability while they are performing their duties in a reasonable manner, in the heat of the moment.

        I fail to see why it should protect the police from engaging in cold, calculated retribution of perceived enemies.

        • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 540 days ago
          That's a reasonable expectation for what qualified immunity is.

          But then there's the reality, which is that it's been abused via a "chicken and egg" problem.

          It's called "piercing the veil of qualified immunity" and the standard for doing so is "currently established law". IOW, if it's not been pierced in the past for exactly (and I mean exactly) the same thing, then the default is that qualified immunity applies.

          What ends up happening is that even if the broad strokes are exactly the same, they'll claim there is no currently established law if some of the minutia of the details is different. The police officer kicked the pregnant woman in the face instead of the stomach.

          The effect is that qualified immunity stopped being reasonable.

          ---

          If I may, I suspect most reasonable people understand that qualified immunity is there because police officers are human and mistakes happen. But it's been abused, and as such it needs to be reformed.

          ---

          editing this in as a perfect example of what I mean about courts using specificity to effectively make it impossible to pierce the veil of qualified immunity.

          Many thanks to btown for the link, I went looking for something similar and was unable to find it.

          https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/qualified-immunity-lega...

          > In other words, prior case law holding it unlawful to deploy police dogs against nonthreatening suspects who surrendered by laying on the ground did not make it clear that it was unlawful to deploy police dogs against nonthreatening suspects who surrendered by sitting on the ground with their hands up.

          • karmelapple 540 days ago
            I hope Congress could pass a law ending qualified immunity.

            If you do, too, contact your US House legislators about HR 1470 and your desire to end qualified immunity: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1470

            • ufmace 540 days ago
              It seems pretty obvious to me that it ought to be reformed to be basically what /u/SamBam thought it was instead of being eliminated entirely.
              • tremon 539 days ago
                If a child can't use a dangerous toy responsibly, you take away the toy first. Maybe, when the child is more mature, it can have its toy back. You don't let the child keep the toy and wait for it to mature on its own, all the while allowing it to keep harming others and itself.
              • puffoflogic 539 days ago
                It was that originally, and then it was subverted. An attempt to reestablish the original intent will most likely be subverted again. Good intentions are irrelevant.
          • logifail 540 days ago
            > qualified immunity is there because police officers are human and mistakes happen

            Last time I checked, all humans are human ... and mistakes happen. Try using that line the next time you're explaining yourself to the police.

            I'm not sure I understand why police officers should get any kind of extra leniency? I'd probably want to hold police officers to higher standards than the public, not lower.

          • Phrodo_00 540 days ago
            > if it's not been pierced in the past for exactly (and I mean exactly) the same thing, then the default is that qualified immunity applies

            I've heard this before, but I don't completely get it. Can someone explain it in more detail? Does this mean the only thing that can pierce the veil are rulings from before qualified immunity was put in place? What about new laws or constitutional amendments?

            • nzealand 540 days ago
              Qualified Immunity is US case law precedent, which means the courts basically are applying existing laws to novel situations to make new laws (Harlow v. Fitzgerald.)

              Initially, courts ruled that the police lost qualified immunity if they performed an action that they knew violated peoples rights (Malley v. Briggs)

              Lately, courts have basically said "how could the government know it was a violation of this guys rights? Sure, there is a very similar case which said you can't violate this right, but the details are slightly different, so how could they know the persons rights were protected in this specific case? Case dismissed." (Zadeh v. Robinson)

              It's absurd, not just because the details are always different, but because the initial case law was set without any similar precedent. It basically takes a particularly egregious violation of your rights to overcome the qualified part of qualified immunity and sue the government (Taylor v. Riojas)

              (Not a lawyer, but married to one.)

        • jakelazaroff 541 days ago
          Because cops are above the law. And, as both major political parties compete to be perceived as more pro-police than the other, no one in power will do anything to change that.
          • js2 540 days ago
            > both major political parties compete to be perceived as more pro-police than the other

            You know that's not true. It's not the Democratic candidates that regularly trot out the Willie Horton ads. As I write this, Mehmet Oz is running ads against Fetterman for being soft on crime.

            https://whyy.org/articles/election-2022-pennsylvania-senate-...

            The police reform bill was the work of the Democrats:

            https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/democrats-police-leg...

            The party position:

            https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/protecti...

            Go ahead, show me the GOP position on policing.

            • jakelazaroff 540 days ago
              Have you paid attention to what politicians are actually doing? President Biden is pushing for an additional $37 billion in police funding and hiring an additional 100,000 officers. In my home state, Governor Hochul is emphatically against any sort of defunding and has pledged an additional $50 million to local police departments. NYC Mayor Adams (a former cop) is rabidly pro-police, even though the NYPD are among the worst lawbreakers in the city.

              It’s true that Republicans are an order of magnitude more bloodthirsty — which makes the Democrats’ full-throated embrace of carceral policies all the more baffling. If I wanted regressive faux–law and order, why would I vote for them instead of a Republican?

              • js2 540 days ago
                I have. The Democratic party is not as progressive as I would like on a whole host of issues (climate, immigration, healthcare, anti-trust, really, you name it).

                But I also recognize that defunding the police is an incredibly unpopular position even among most Democratic voters. Even in the communities affected most by crime and bad policing[1]. Most people do not want fewer police. They want better police.

                So the Democrats "embrace policing" because if they don't, they lose elections. Especially with crime on the rise, whether real or perceived. But that doesn't mean that the two parties are the same with respect to policing and I don't think it helps the progressive cause being cynical about it.

                1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/26/growing-sha...

          • ejb999 541 days ago
            there are more than a few cops sitting in jail right now that would disagree with your blanket statement.
            • jakelazaroff 541 days ago
              I can't tell — did you interpret my comment as "not a single police officer, without exception, suffers any sort of legal punishment for their actions," or are you trying to tell me that it's common for cops to be held accountable when they break the law?
              • seti0Cha 541 days ago
                Not OP but I think it probably is fairly common for them to be held accountable. I haven't seen any statistics on it, but I regard it is the most plausible case. You're claiming otherwise. What reason can you give for me to change my opinion?
                • PuppyTailWags 540 days ago
                  According to the organization Mapping Police Violence, police have killed 390 people in the untied states thus far. 13 have been charged with any crime. Maybe police are just like over 95% justified when they kill people, but I kind of doubt it.
                  • seti0Cha 540 days ago
                    Why? Is it not the case that they are charged with apprehending armed and dangerous people who may try to kill them? Wouldn't you expect that that would sometimes result in the person they are confronting being killed? How many times did they confront armed dangerous people in total? How many times were they killed by the armed dangerous people? Those two numbers alone don't give nearly enough information to draw any conclusions.
                  • _-david-_ 540 days ago
                    How many of the killings were unjustified? We can't actually gain anything of meaning from your post without that detail.
                    • jandrese 540 days ago
                      It's difficult to impossible to know because the police will just investigate themselves and declare that there was no wrongdoing. Typically the media has to get involved for the officers to be under any real danger of prosecution.
                • xapata 540 days ago
                  > fairly common

                  It is possible that police are both "commonly" held accountable, yet not "often enough" for the good of society. Devil is in the details.

                  • seti0Cha 540 days ago
                    In fact, I think "not often enough" is most likely the case. It may seem pedantic to others, but I think there's a huge difference between this claim and that made by OP. One suggests a problem of deficient enforcement, the other asserts that something is fundamentally wrong with our society and its legal system. The first can be addressed through improvement to law, the second suggest much more radical change is necessary. Saying it's the problem is the second when it's actually the first actually hinders effective change.
                    • tsimionescu 540 days ago
                      Changing the law can't change the principle of qualified immunity, unless you ammend the constitution. And, as others have pointed out, qualified immunity has been used to save a police office that loosed violent dogs on a suspect sitting on the ground with their hands up, because while there was established precedent that loosing violent dogs on suspects laying on the ground is illegal, this had not yet been tested in court for suspects sitting on the ground with their hands up, so how could the officer had known that the court would look down on such a thing?

                      If this decision doesn't show there is something deeply, fundamentally, disgustingly wrong with your legal system, I don't think anything else can show that.

                    • xapata 540 days ago
                      An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force by Roland G. Fryer might support that. He concludes that oversight of gun use (by police officers) effectively removes the statistically significant racial bias that non-gun use of force has.
                • mox1 540 days ago
                  How many other professions in the world have a Wikipedia page for XYZ code of silence[1]?

                  Further reading: https://aele.org/loscode2000.html

                  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_wall_of_silence

                  • seti0Cha 540 days ago
                    This argument basically boils down to "if that were not the case, why would so many people say it was the case"? That's not a great way to decide important issues.
                    • Retric 540 days ago
                      Cops talk about the blue all of silence not just regular people. It shows up in multiple court cases with cops lying to protect other cops up to and including perjury.

                      To read the bias read up on the Jason Van Dyke case, first time in 50 years a Chicago cop convicted of murder after being caught on camera and he served 3 and 1/4 years in prison. “The U.S. attorney's office confirmed on April 13, 2015,[57] that they had been conducting a federal criminal investigation of the McDonald case in conjunction with the state attorney's office, after contradictions were found between the initial police report and the dash-cam video

                      Look, if you have zero counter evidence than any evidence to the contrary should be persuasive.

                      • seti0Cha 540 days ago
                        Citing individual cases doesn't say anything about what is usual. And you're the one making a claim that cops usually are not held accountable. I'm not trying to convince you that they usually are, I'm just saying that that's what I believe and offering to let you convince me. So no, I don't have to provide any evidence. If you don't want to either fine. But then why are you replying?

                        edit: looking at this again, I think I misread your point. You're claiming that unless I have evidence that shows that police are usually held accountable, then any evidence that they are not, even anecdotal, should convince me. I would say that's plainly not correct. If I know nothing about whether police are held accountable, a single case demonstrating one not being held accountable does not warrant assuming they usually are not. It only demonstrates that they are not always held accountable and tells me nothing about frequency. Drawing broad inferences from too little data is a pernicious problem in our society. That said, I can find plenty of anecdotes where cops were held accountable. How am I to know which is more typical?

                        • Retric 540 days ago
                          It’s often overblown but Bayesian statistics shows you should ideally update your mental model with every single piece of new information.

                          It’s unrealistic to actually carry that out in every case, but in cases where you have zero evidence updating your views based on the first bit of evidence you receive is absolutely the correct choice. The degree to which any single piece of evidence should change your mindset is of course minimal, but holding a view with zero supporting evidence in the face of multiple pieces of counter evidence is a sign of insanity.

                          • ninkendo 540 days ago
                            If there’s a selection bias causing you to only ever see evidence pointing in one direction, you probably shouldn’t update your priors.

                            Cops doing their job in a routine way doesn’t make the news. Cops taking steps to de-escalate things and avoid killing someone doesn’t make the news. Cops killing someone (justified or not) typically does.

                            If every time you see a news report of a police officer killing someone, you come away thinking “police must just be killing people left and right”, you’re forming an inaccurate conclusion. If you get your news from anything that’s driven by attention/clicks (that is to say, approximately everywhere), it’s a doubly inaccurate conclusion.

                            • Retric 540 days ago
                              This isn’t about the rates that cops are committing crimes, it’s about cops getting more leniency from the system than regular people.

                              There aren’t that many documented cases of cops shooting people without justification, but in those cases you often find instances of cops covering up for other cops. That’s evidence not just for these cases but also otehr cases which where successfully suppressed.

                          • seti0Cha 540 days ago
                            Well I did minimally adjust my priors based on that evidence actually. The fact that a lot of people are making claims here also adjusts them very slightly (I already knew many people felt this way). But I've got heavy weighting on policy matters needing non-anecdotal data, so not much of a change really.
                            • Retric 540 days ago
                              The statistics are available ex:

                              In the United States between 2005 and 2020, of the 42 nonfederal police officers convicted following their arrest for murder due to an on-duty shooting, only five ended up being convicted of murder.

                              By comparison:

                              In 2018 70% of US murder cases resulted in conviction.

                              • ninkendo 540 days ago
                                That would make sense though, right? We literally make officers carry guns and tell them “use this to defend yourself, and as a last resort against dangerous suspects when the situation warrants” as part of their job description. It stands to reason that the likelihood of a cop using their gun in a “legal” way is higher on average than the average person who fires a gun. Even in cases where an officer does get arrested on suspicion of murder, it’s less likely to be convict-able than average.
                                • Retric 540 days ago
                                  Except there are many steps before a trial where a cop legally shooting someone won’t end up on trial. Not every murder trial is going to be of a guilty person, but someone going on trial for murder suggests there is significant evidence they actually committed murder.

                                  Conviction rates of 12% vs 70% show a very strong bias.

                • jkestner 540 days ago
                  • seti0Cha 540 days ago
                    That study finds that many times the coroner's report is filled out such that the death is not properly classified as being due to the police so the number of deaths caused by the police may be twice what is reported. The strongest interpretation I can make of this is that if all those misreportings were coverups for murder, then the police would be being held accountable for less than half of the people they killed. However, the study indicates that the problem is largely due to untrained coroners and complex reporting procedures, which doesn't suggest a massive coverup, and I don't think we can assume they all represent murders the police got away with. It doesn't really say anything about how many unjustified deaths occurred vs. how many were justified, and it's specific to deaths as opposed to harassment or corruption or what have you, so I can't say it really convinces me that police are generally not held accountable for their actions.
                • jakelazaroff 540 days ago
                  Check out the Twitter account @placardabuse [1]. It documents endemic lawbreaking by the NYPD. When civilians report lawbreaking, virtually without fail, the complaints are ignored — even when the violation is something the NYPD is ostensibly focusing on cracking down on, like “ghost cars”. Anecdotally, the vast majority of traffic violations I see are by police, and I have never had a report that resulted in any sort of action.

                  Your comment has a baked in assumption I want to question, though. Why do you regard police accountability as the most plausible default?

                  [1] https://twitter.com/placardabuse

                • bryanrasmussen 540 days ago
                  what would cause you to think that they were not held accountable? you mention statistics, what statistics would be of interest to you in this matter?
                  • seti0Cha 540 days ago
                    I mention statistics but I didn't say I required seeing statistics to be convinced. I'm not sure what kind of argument or evidence would convince me, but I promise you, if you give me reasons, I'll evaluate them with as open a mind as I am able. What convinced you?
                    • bryanrasmussen 540 days ago
                      the various statistics that have already been brought out in the various sub-posts to your original post.

                      there seem to be a large number of complaints against police officers in the U.S.

                      very few of these actually go to an indictment.

                      of these ones that go to an indictment it seems fewer get heavy sentences in comparison to the rest of the population for similar infractions.

                      all of this seems to make the police a statistical anomaly in comparison to other people accused of criminal conduct.

                      Occam's razor would suggest that the reason that police do better than other people in not being indicted, not being convicted, and receiving lesser sentences is because they are police.

                      • seti0Cha 540 days ago
                        > the various statistics that have already been brought out in the various sub-posts to your original post.

                        Have there? I haven't seen them. Best I've seen is a study suggesting that killings by police may be undercounted due to mistakes in reporting, but doesn't make any claims that these represent crimes committed by police.

                        > there seem to be a large number of complaints against police officers in the U.S.

                        Google tells me there are 900,000 cops in the US. That's a large number too. What's the complaint/cop ratio?

                        > very few of these actually go to an indictment

                        How many fewer than we'd expect? What's the normal indictment rate? What should it be?

                        > of these ones that go to an indictment it seems fewer get heavy sentences in comparison to the rest of the population for similar infractions.

                        Again, how many fewer? These are all things I would expect could be demonstrated empirically. What are the actual numbers? It seems like people are mostly going by their gut feeling, which I just don't find convincing.

                        • bryanrasmussen 540 days ago
                          I do have some difficulty actually believing that you would be convinced, and it seems a bit weird everyone has to go do the googling for you but here are stats on police violence in U.S

                          https://www.security.org/resources/police-brutality-statisti...

                          note however this is violence, not corruption which would be a separate thing https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249850.pdf

                          as it happens statistics on corruption in police in U.S are very few, even fewer than those about violence which only recently have started becoming available.

                          >How many fewer than we'd expect? What's the normal indictment rate? What should it be?

                          obviously the normal indictment rate would be how many 'civilians' who get the cops called on them then go on to have an actual court case.

                          https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

                          would be where I would start on that. But of course that is very low-level, as you can see from the earlier link in this post https://www.security.org/resources/police-brutality-statisti... they say there are few indictments, I would just accept that as the case as the experts having done the low level work instead of doing the low level work because everyone doing the low level work themselves is unfortunately very inefficient and if we had to do that we would not be able to do anything else, which sometimes it seems to me that people who do not accept the conclusions of the experts but demand that the low level work be done on an individual basis in order to argue fairly are actually hoping that nothing will be done at all.

                          • seti0Cha 540 days ago
                            > I do have some difficulty actually believing that you would be convinced, and it seems a bit weird everyone has to go do the googling for you but here are stats on police violence in U.S

                            That's understandable. Looking back on our interaction, it does seem unfair that I should say I don't necessarily need stats, but then immediately ask for stats. It reads like a bait and switch. My apologies, I think I just got caught up in all the back and forth. I really do want to be openminded about this, but I didn't do a great job of showing it.

                            I also understand where you are coming from about it seeming like I'm asking people to google things for me. However, from my perspective, I see people making a lot of assertions as if they were common knowledge and yet when I look I don't see what they are claiming. As an example, the sources you provide don't directly bear on any of the questions I asked.

                            We can see for instance that blacks are arrested a lot more frequently than whites. But we also know that blacks are disproportionally poor, and poor people are more likely to be arrested and convicted than middle income or wealthy people. The reasons for that can be debated, but without controlling for income and other confounding factors, you don't really know to what degree blacks are disproportionately represented. That's just basic statistics. Maybe there are studies that do this, but I haven't seen any, nor apparently have the other commenters here.

                            But that's not even directly relevant to whether police generally are held accountable for breaking the law generally. As you yourself said, there aren't many statistics on this. And yet people are claiming it a well established fact. I think that's wrong. I'm sure it happens to some degree (everything happens to some degree for large populations), but we need to understand the scope of problems so we can address them properly. As I said elsewhere, do we need to tweak the system or replace it? We can't know until we know what we're dealing with. Just assuming it's really really bad may feel helpful, but I don't think it is.

                            > I would just accept that as the case as the experts having done the low level work instead of doing the low level work because everyone doing the low level work themselves is unfortunately very inefficient

                            This is a good point. However, it's not clear to me that the experts are saying what is claimed. Take this from the conclusion from your first link:

                            > While there’s room for debate over policy interventions that might limit the number of police killings, there’s inadequate accountability or scrutiny for these incidents. When police kill a civilian, the initial assumption by some is that the incident was justified, while others automatically assume it wasn’t. While the truth may be somewhere in between, the public can’t possibly make informed decisions without cold, hard facts.

                            Totally agree! This is exactly what I'm saying. But this report isn't claiming to provide those cold hard facts, they are saying they are needed. Great! But why is everyone acting like they already have them?

                            People keep pointing at the disproportional numbers of minorities killed, but don't discuss confounding factors. For example, it should not at all surprise us that native americans would be highly represented in this area because they are among the poorest people in the country, many living in areas with no jobs and high drug and alcohol abuse rates where domestic violence and other violent crime is well above the national average. It would be strange if this didn't result in higher rates of conflict with the police, and hence higher rates of death. Is there more than that going on? Maybe. It needs to be studied. For instance, how does it compare to similarly impoverished white communities? That's the sort of thing I'm looking for.

                            In short, I'm really not trying to be difficult here, but it seems to me that people are not asking basic questions, so I can't really trust their conclusions. I do appreciate your taking the time though and I hope you don't feel like you've been trolled. I do appreciate your patience.

                  • pessimizer 540 days ago
                    We're on the internet. When people are interested in statistics, they search for them, then tell you the ones they couldn't find that might change their opinion. When they're interested in arguing, they tell you that it's "most plausible" that they're right although they haven't seen any statistics, and ask you to convince them otherwise.
                    • seti0Cha 540 days ago
                      As it happens though, I did search for statistics on this and found none. Granted, I didn't spend a lot of time on it. However, given the large number of people who feel passionately that they know the state of things here, I don't think it was unreasonable to ask them how they came to that conclusion. How about you? Do you have anything useful to say?
                • nyuszika7h 540 days ago
                  undefined
            • vkou 541 days ago
              Our prisons would be empty if locking away the average convict took half the effort that was necessary to put them where they are.
              • nkurz 540 days ago
                It took me several re-readings to conclude that "them" and "they" at the end of this sentence are referring to different people!

                I think what vkou is saying (and I agree) is that while there currently are some police in prison who have been convicted of crimes, the difficulty factor of convicting a police officer is much higher than the difficulty of convicting a normal person. If the same higher standard for obtaining a conviction was applied to everyone else, hardly anyone would be sent to prison.

          • somat 540 days ago
            "Because cops are above the law"

            Yes, that is what makes them cops, the police are authorized to do many things that are illegal for us ordinary citizens. they can restrain people, go through stop lights, speed, threaten, sometimes even kill.

            We as society recognize that these things are in general bad to do, however there are special cases where it is needed. so we authorize some people to professionally break the law where needed.

            That being said, the quote "Who watches the watchmen?" is as always very relevant and those authorized to break the law need to be held to a very high moral standard.

            • Phrodo_00 540 days ago
              Police should not be _above_ the law. It's reasonable that they have more attributions to be able to do their jobs, but those should be very well established within the law. The problem is that qualified immunity seems to have actually put them in a position where they can ignore the law.
            • jakelazaroff 540 days ago
              There’s a difference between being given special powers and being above the law. Special powers are exceptional privileges that are limited in scope. Being “above the law” means you’re exceeding even those privileges, but no one will hold you accountable.

              Let’s take your red light example. Cops are allowed to go through red lights when they’re responding to an emergency and they’ve put on their lights/sirens. That’s a reasonable special power. In practice, what I see happening is either (a) police briefly turn on their lights/sirens as they cross the intersection, then immediately turn them off, or (b) police simply run the red light.

            • HWR_14 540 days ago
              > he police are authorized to do many things that are illegal for us ordinary citizens. they can restrain people, go through stop lights, speed, threaten, sometimes even kill.

              But not whenever they want. When needed. You could do any of those things legally in most states. The first to prevent a suicidal person from killing themselves, the next two when driving a serious case to the ER, the last two when defending yourself from an armed home intruder.

          • seti0Cha 541 days ago
            These cops are currently in court, being subjected to the law. If you read the judge's rulings, you can see that the opinions are not about the facts of the case but how the law applies to them. If they get the suit dismissed, it will have been done through legal means. So no, this isn't because the cops are above the law. The law may be constructed as to favor them unfairly, but that's an entirely other matter.
            • TheCoelacanth 541 days ago
              If a court ignores the plain meaning of the law to dismiss a suit against the police, then the police are above the law.
              • seti0Cha 540 days ago
                The same court had ruled against them previously. If they just wanted to let them off, why didn't they do it then? It seems to me the most reasonable explanation is that they were interpreting the law (IANAL but badly it seems to me in the second case) not ignoring it. That may amount to the same to you but I think there's a huge difference in terms of how to remediate the situation. To me, the answer is to amend the law so that it does what we want rather than just make blanket claims that can't be acted on.
        • btown 540 days ago
          I mean, this is how it should work morally, and arguably how the law was designed to work.

          But it has since been interpreted as this: even if it is clear to all parties that the duties were not performed in a reasonable manner, qualified immunity applies unless the case fits the exact pattern of a prior case that held officials accountable.

          How exact must the match of circumstances be? https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/qualified-immunity-lega... (note: opinions in this article and by this organization are not mine) has examples:

          > A prior Sixth Circuit case had already held that an officer clearly violated the Fourth Amendment when he used a police dog without warning against an unarmed residential burglary suspect who was lying on the ground with his hands at his sides.42 But the court here held that this prior case was insufficient because “Baxter does not point us to any case law suggesting that raising his hands, on its own, is enough to put Harris on notice that a canine apprehension was unlawful in these circumstances.”43 In other words, prior case law holding it unlawful to deploy police dogs against nonthreatening suspects who surrendered by laying on the ground did not make it clear that it was unlawful to deploy police dogs against nonthreatening suspects who surrendered by sitting on the ground with their hands up.

          > Nevertheless, in spite of this objectively unreasonable shooting, a majority of the Sixth Circuit panel found that the officer was entitled to qualified immunity. The court itself acknowledged that several prior cases had clearly established that “shooting a driver while positioned to the side of his fleeing car violates the Fourth Amendment, absent some indication suggesting that the driver poses more than a fleeting threat.”46 Even though that statement would seem to govern this case exactly, the majority held that these prior cases were “distinguishable” because they “involved officers confronting a car in a parking lot and shooting the non‐ violent driver as he attempted to initiate flight,” whereas here “Phillips shot Latits after Latits led three police officers on a car chase for several minutes.”47 The lone dissenting judge in this case dryly observed that “the degree of factual similarity that the majority’s approach requires is probably impossible for any plaintiff to meet.”48

          To make an analogy to our industry, it's like the famous Reflections on Trusting Trust compiler paper here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref... - if your compiler is compromised to the extent that even when compiling a compiler, it inserts the same exact compromise in the newly compiled compiler... then there's no turning back.

          And here we have a concept of qualified immunity that cannot ever be given nuance, because it's impossible to adjudicate based on a no-longer-existing version of the case law that allows nuance to be added to the concept of qualified immunity. It's, quite literally, a cancer from any logical perspective. We should be ashamed as a society to have allowed such a system to exist. Only new national legislation, to my knowledge, can stop the rot, and that will come far too late for many who have suffered at the hands of law enforcement officials.

          (IANAL, this is not legal advice)

      • voxic11 541 days ago
        If the officers actions don't fall under qualified immunity then he can be sued personally and would be responsible for paying any damages awarded. The taxpayers might elect to cover the officers damages but they are generally not required to by state or federal law. There are some exceptions to this like New Mexico which abolished qualified immunity but at the same time required that the employer of the police cover any damages resulting from cases where the officer would have previously been covered by qualified immunity.
        • matthewmcg 541 days ago
          Even if indemnification is not required by law, it's frequently written into the terms of many employment contracts and collective bargaining agreements. A recent study [1] using public records requests found that virtually all officers are indemnified, meaning they don't have to personally satisfy a judgement against them.

          [1] https://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-89-number-3/polic...

          • aidenn0 541 days ago
            I'm actually fine with indemnification because it creates an incentive for departments to not employ cops that are going to get them sued.
            • msbarnett 541 days ago
              This might be true if the lawsuit damages were paid out of police budgets, but in many instances this isn't the case – the lawsuits are paid out of a combination of municipal liability insurance claims and the general city budget, eg) https://abcnews.go.com/US/millions-lawsuit-settlements-hidde... or https://www.npr.org/2020/09/19/914170214/police-settlements-...

              There's a broad disconnect between the police departments, their hiring and disciplinary practices, and the consequences of the lawsuits their actions generate.

              • aidenn0 541 days ago
                I have a friend who is a cop, and when testifying in a use of force case, he was pressured by his superiors to express his opinions in a way that would minimize liability for the department, so at least anecdotally they care about lawsuits.
                • michaelmrose 540 days ago
                  They care enough to lie and manipulate where it is trivial to do so that isn't a high standard.
              • lotsofpulp 541 days ago
                Tax revenue is fungible, it does not make a difference which budget it comes from. The city’s residents are still going to have the same expectation of police services. It has to be individual police that are liable.
                • msbarnett 541 days ago
                  The overall fungibility of tax revenue is irrelevant to the criticism of the perverse incentives at play here.

                  Tying the payouts specifically to the police budget would mean that when the city's residents' policing service expectations failed to be met, one could point to that being a direct consequence of police actions costing them their own policing budget, increasing pressure on the public to do things like elect effective police oversight commissioners who will act to reign in their abuses and provide good value-for-cost policing.

                  The status quo instead disconnects the oversight from the consequences, leading to the quiet defunding of other services for political reasons (since it would require city counsels to constantly vote to cut police budgets in proportion to each damage award, rather than happening "neutrally" by centering the legal defense and payouts within the police budget to begin with).

                  • lotsofpulp 540 days ago
                    > Tying the payouts specifically to the police budget would mean that when the city's residents' policing service expectations failed to be met, one could point to that being a direct consequence of police actions costing them their own policing budget, increasing pressure on the public to do things like elect effective police oversight commissioners who will act to reign in their abuses and provide good value-for-cost policing.

                    This is a very tall order that I predict would not come true. It is already very easy to see how much police misconduct costs a city’s tax base, but push come to shove, most people will think they are isolated cases and will not happen to them.

                    > The status quo instead disconnects the oversight from the consequences, leading to the quiet defunding of other services for political reasons

                    This political reason is that voting in local elections is not common. 100% of the police and their allies will be voting, while most others will be spending their evenings on things other than paying attention to local politics.

                    There are a few exceptions, but overall, I would not expect voters to react to feeling the pain of reduced police budgets with “let’s dig into why police budgets are getting smaller”. By and large, they will simply vote for the politician that provides the simplest message, which is the incumbents are refusing to properly fund the police department, and if you vote for me, I will properly fund it.

                    The only solution I see is holding individual cops accountable, including for criminal charges like perjury for lying such as the detective in this case clearly did.

            • int_19h 540 days ago
              It also creates an incentive for departments to cover up for cops who do something they shouldn't have done.
        • stonogo 541 days ago

            Your point is irrelevant as Novak is suing the city, not any individual officer.  This has nothing to do with qualified immunity.
          
          Edit: the above is wrong, and I apologize. I got all hopped up thinking of the wrong case.
          • lotsofpulp 541 days ago
            He is suing the individual officers:

            https://reason.com/2022/09/28/a-parodist-asks-scotus-to-let-...

            >After a jury unanimously acquitted Novak of that felony, he sued seven officers for violating his First Amendment rights.

            >But this year the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit concluded that the officers he sued were protected by qualified immunity, which shields police from liability for violating constitutional rights unless their alleged misconduct ran afoul of "clearly established" law.

          • msbarnett 541 days ago
            Completely wrong. The 6th circuit's affirmation of the lower court's summary judgement was entirely based on the officers' entitlement to qualified immunity. Read the opinion yourself: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca6/18... . That's the particular dispute that's heading to the Supreme Court. The municipal liability is unrelated to this amicus brief, which is entirely about the QI dispute.
      • Spoom 541 days ago
        And the worst outcome is that parody is no longer protected under the First Amendment unless it is explicitly disclaimed. I fear that we may see that ruling come through.
        • not2b 541 days ago
          Doubt it. As bad as the current court is, some of the conservative members take the First Amendment seriously (Gorsuch, Roberts) so I think the parodist will win.
          • jacobr1 540 days ago
            And even the others who might have different views on obscenity, still hold political special to be special.
        • gopher_space 540 days ago
          We will just end up with another popup you'll dismiss without reading. I love how easy it is to shift legal and moral burdens these days.

          /s

      • not2b 541 days ago
        No, that's a separate question. Qualified immunity is about whether the cops can be punished for their misconduct, but what is being appealed is a crazy court decision that basically says satire and parody isn't protected speech unless is basically says "THIS IS SATIRE" at the very beginning.

        Often courts rule that a search was invalid or a conviction is tossed out, but almost never are the cops punished for the invalid search or arrest.

      • michaelmrose 540 days ago
        Qualified immunity is the concept that an individual acting for the state in certain roles may not be directly pursued for damages save for certain egregious circumstances. It is not now nor has it ever been a shield protecting the local government as a whole from being found liable as it routinely is. It is likely a non-issue in this case where the issue at hand is that the government violated this individuals rights and the benefit to society would be a ruling that they clearly aren't allowed to do so in the future.
    • sbuttgereit 541 days ago
      When I see these things, I always try to take the opportunity to plug the Institute for Justice (https://ij.org/). They do outstanding work and I've always been satisfied with how my contributions have been put to use.
      • jkestner 540 days ago
        I'm generally very happy with their use of my contributions as well, with the exception of advocating the Supreme Court to require Maine to fund vouchers to private religious schools.
    • tyre 541 days ago
      Is the detective being charged with lying to a grand jury?
      • cb321 541 days ago
        I think that is a very good question. I know that is a plaintiff/Novak claim, but I don't know its supporting evidence.

        The detective's legal vulnerability may rely on the transcript of his exact testimony both to the grand jury and at trial.

        It could be that, at the grand jury, he almost defined parody in two parts - with one part easily quoted out of context. "Oh, erm, what I meant was the complainers said 'at first I thought it was honest to god real' and then 'I figured out it was a parody'".

        It could also be the detective only mentioned the first part (people being confused) at the grand jury and the full story only at trial which is more sketchy/makes him more legally vulnerable (but IANAL).

      • jandrese 540 days ago
        No chance. If the police aren't allowed to lie to the jury their conviction numbers would suffer, which makes the police department look bad.
  • mmastrac 541 days ago
    This is honestly a beautiful piece of work, and will likely be a popular read for law students for decades to come. This is just from the first part:

    > The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered cover- age of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily read- ership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human his- tory.

    > In addition to maintaining a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires, The Onion supports more than 350,000 full- and part- time journalism jobs in its numerous news bureaus and manual labor camps stationed around the world, and members of its editorial board have served with distinction in an advisory capacity for such nations as China, Syria, Somalia, and the former Soviet Union. On top of its journalistic pursuits, The Onion also owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes, stands on the nation’s leading edge on matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily.

    > The Onion’s keen, fact-driven reportage has been cited favorably by one or more local courts, as well as Iran and the Chinese state-run media. Along the way, The Onion’s journalists have garnered a sterling reputation for accurately forecasting future events. One such coup was The Onion’s scoop revealing that a for- mer president kept nuclear secrets strewn around his beach home’s basement three years before it even hap- pened.

    • CobrastanJorji 541 days ago
      The conclusion is straight up poetry:

      > The Onion intends to continue its socially valuable role bringing the disinfectant of sunlight into the halls of power. And it would vastly prefer that sunlight not to be measured out to its writers in 15- minute increments in an exercise yard.

    • dralley 540 days ago
      > The Onion’s journalists have garnered a sterling reputation for accurately forecasting future events.

      No one can forget this gem

      https://www.theonion.com/bush-our-long-national-nightmare-of...

    • moffkalast 541 days ago
      The Soviet Onion
  • zerovox 541 days ago
    • Spoom 541 days ago
      Highly recommend reading the brief. It's actually pretty hilarious.
      • metalliqaz 541 days ago
        > "The Onion’s journalists have garnered a sterling reputation for accurately forecasting future events. One such coup was The Onion’s scoop revealing that a former president kept nuclear secrets strewn around his beach home’s basement three years before it even happened.[2]"

        > [2] See Mar-a-Lago Assistant Manager Wondering if Anyone Coming to Collect Nuclear Briefcase from Lost and Found, The Onion, Mar. 27, 2017, https://bit.ly/3S40xiP.

        Incredible

        • consumer451 541 days ago
          > Tu stultus es. You are dumb. These three Latin words have been The Onion’s motto and guiding light since it was founded in 1988 as America’s Finest News Source, leading its writers toward the paper’s singular purpose of pointing out that its readers are deeply gullible people.

          > The Onion’s motto is central to this brief for two important reasons. First, it’s Latin. And The Onion knows that the federal judiciary is staffed entirely by total Latin dorks: They quote Catullus in the original Latin in chambers.

          > They sweetly whisper “stare decisis” into their spouses’ ears. They mutter “cui bono” under their breath while picking up after their neighbors’ dogs. So The Onion knew that, unless it pointed to a suitably Latin rallying cry, its brief would be operating far outside the Court’s vernacular.

          Sum mortuus.

    • tremon 541 days ago
      I just love that the brief's core argument is summarized in the table of contents, under ARGUMENT.
    • JieJie 541 days ago
      I've copied a few bits from this and included some clippings as context from The Onion's first year in 1988. Surprisingly, this is (more-or-less) historically accurate.

      https://twitter.com/ZipBangWow/status/1577326165370769408

    • itsmemattchung 541 days ago
      > The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history

      Love it. 4.3 trillion people..

  • tempodox 541 days ago
    > Anthony Novak spent four days in jail over a Facebook page he created in 2016 that mocked his local police department.

    This whole thing should be an Onion satire but it's reality.

    • yrgulation 541 days ago
      A lot of past decade news sound like onion satire. Both in europe and the us. We have to be careful which way we steer things as a lot of things appear to take a very very non democratic non western direction.
      • AlexandrB 541 days ago
        > ...non western direction.

        What does this mean and how is it relevant to the article or the parent comment? A lot of the recent rollback of rights are very much "western" in nature. The overturn of roe v. wade, for example, is a long standing project of various Christian groups. Nor is "the west" immune to dictatorship - you only have to go back to WWII for proof of that.

        • cronin101 541 days ago
          With the US thrust into the de-facto "centre of the Anglo-sphere" (note: I am not American, as astute readers might deduce from preceding spelling), many terms are in need of an overhaul. It's particularly amusing how news of the "West" comes from the East and the "East" is accessed by flying West.

          Words are hard (and currently under a lot of scrutiny). Has anyone tried turning the language off and on again?

          • mmcdermott 541 days ago
            > Has anyone tried turning the language off and on again?

            Wouldn't do any good. The English language has a venerable codebase, a high turnover development team and lava flow development all over the place.

            Modernization attempts haven't gone well, but more PRs come in by the day.

            • cestith 541 days ago
              At the end of the day, English is less a language in the sense of other languages and more a pluggable framework an empire developed for adopting the vocabulary of other peoples and stuffing them into a loose sort of syntax together.
          • yamtaddle 541 days ago
            Words like this always end up being wrong if they're used long enough, but are still useful and everyone gets what you mean, so they're fine, since that's the whole point. See also: "3rd world".
        • marcus_holmes 541 days ago
          It's a euro-centric term. The West of Europe has a historical bias towards freedom of expression, democracy, religious freedom (arguable) etc, and that got extended to include America when it got big enough to join the party.

          The East of Europe, by comparison, tended to authoritarianism, and that extended to include China when it got big enough to join the party.

          Of course, it depends on where you draw the line on East vs West - Germany could be either, or both, and historically has been all flavours of political spectrum.

          As others have said, it makes no sense from an American viewpoint because geography.

          The christian evangelic movement is very authoritarian, which makes them Eastern. Christianity (or professed christianity) doesn't automatically make them Western.

          • kgarten 541 days ago
            >the west of Europe has a historical bias towards freedom of expression etc

            what?? since when ... ? Spain (franco, Spanish Inquisition)? France (Robespierre, Napoleon)? Germany? Italy(Mousolini)? ...

            most countries are now leaning towards freedom od expression, yet freedom of sppech is much more restricted compared to the US (and other countries) for example ... the term western does not make sense at all in this context.

            I sounds to me similar to "Judeo Christian values" something made up to exclude people.

            • PathOfEclipse 540 days ago
              The French Revolution was decidedly atheist and leftwing. Most French thinkers of the time looked down on the American revolution and it's Christian values. The French revolution is more closely related to Marxism than what people generally refer to when they talk about Western roots.

              Similarly, Germany's Nazi party was highly anti-religious and anti Western values. Hitler said that, after the Jews, the Christians would be next on the chopping block. The Nazi party explicitly sought out to destroy the Christian values of universal human dignity and the responsibility to care for the poor and needy.

              The fascist movement similarly rejected Christian Western roots. Giovanni Gentile, father of fascism, was decidedly atheist. His influence, H.W.F Hegel, was also a strong influence of Karl Marx.

              I don't know much about the history of the Spanish inquisition, but most of the examples you gave were of people in the west who were actively rejecting Western tradition. Not coincidentally, they all came up with something far worse and far more evil. When you achieve a local maximum as great as we have, it's virtually impossible to make any revolutionary change that is not catastrophic.

              • kgarten 540 days ago
                The traditional interpretation of the French Revolution is that of a class struggle (and communists, also Marx, later used it as argumentation). Yet, it also had anarchist, socialist and feminist roots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune

                In regard to Nazis, most Nazis were Christian and the church was integrated in the state. I assume Hitler didn't like the catholic church much, yet he would have never been able to act against Christians as he did against Jews. Hitler declared himself "Not a Catholic, but a German Christian." (Also seeing that most of his officers and people working with him were christian, it's highly questionable).

                Compared to Mussolini (and Genitle), Hitler saw atheists as "stupid and animal like" ...

                "The fascist movement similarly rejected Christian Western roots" Seeing that Hitler read and focused a lot on old German occultism, hypnotism, and astrology, you could say he was going back to the roots.

                > to destroy the Christian values of universal human dignity and the responsibility to care for the poor and needy.

                Universal Human Dignity is not a particular Christian value or Christian in nature. It seems much more grounded in the French Revolution (anarchists, socialists, feminists, and communists). I also don't see much of universal human dignity in the history of the West (whatever is included in it). Inquisition, Crusades, World War I ? ;)

                "the responsibility to care for the poor and needy" The Nazi party came to power because of too many poor and needy ...

                Can you define "Western tradition"? What is part of it and what is not? I have a hard time understanding this concept. If I check Wikipedia on this, it seems Australia and Russia are part of Western Culture ... The concept is fuzzy and confusing.

                "When you achieve a local maximum as great as we have ..." I have trouble with wording like that and the exceptionalism that it implies. If Human rights are universal, we should not try to take possession of them based on our view on history. I was not part of any of the struggles of the people before me and cannot be proud of the fact that I was luckily born on a specific GPS coordinate that makes me German (part of the "West").

                https://theglobalobservatory.org/2018/10/are-human-rights-a-...

                • PathOfEclipse 540 days ago
                  I appreciate your response, but we will have to continue to disagree on just about everything. From the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/04/20/hitler-hat...

                  "Hitler hated Judaism. But he loathed Christianity, too. Hitler’s mother was a devout Catholic. His father considered religion a scam."

                  Also: “In Hitler’s eyes Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves,” wrote Alan Bullock “Hitler, A Study in Tyranny,” a seminal biography. “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle of the fittest.”

                  Also: "By 1942, Hitler vowed, according to Bullock, to “root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches,” describing them as “the evil that is gnawing our vitals.”"

                  Hitler may have made public statements about being Christian, but those were probably more along the lines of him putting on a show to convince his fellow countrymen to follow him. He was as anti-Christian as they come, as was his Nazi movement.

                  We will also have to disagree about the roots of universal human dignity. Here are some readings I might suggest:

                  https://www.amazon.com/Dominion-Making-Western-Tom-Holland/d... https://www.amazon.com/Victory-Reason-Christianity-Freedom-C... https://www.amazon.com/Christian-Activism-Chinese-Societies-...

                  And here is a good short video with snippets of interviews with the historian Tom Holland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW_XOor7lRI

                  When I refer to "Western tradition", I am referring to the Judeo-Christian tradition which singularly gave rise to, among other things, the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, and the constitution of the United States, which itself is heavily based on English law.

                  You should have no trouble with the exceptionalism implied by my statement. We live in the most prosperous and privileged time in recorded human history, and, it's not even a remotely close contest compared to any other time period! It's sad there are so many intent on tearing it down, thinking they'll build something better on top of the ruins, all while failing to truly understand and appreciate what we have and how we got here.

                  • kgarten 540 days ago
                    I don't contest that we live in a prosperous, privileged time. I contest that this is due to "Judeo-Christian tradition" postulated by Christian authors :)

                    if you regard universal human rights and dignity as universal (can be accepted, applied and understood by everybody not regarding their culture, heritage or religion ), do you understand that focusing on one particular root might be divisive ... ;)

                    • PathOfEclipse 540 days ago
                      What has divisiveness to do with any of it? Is it divisive against other plants to claim that apples only come from apple trees? Universal human dignity can be accepted, applied, and understood by everyone. But so can belief in God. In fact, the Christian religion has already spread through virtually every culture already.

                      By the way, one of the books I listed was by an atheist historian, Tom Holland, who was as surprised at his findings as you might expect, so that severely undercuts your insinuation that these ideas are a fictional manifestation of bias.

                      I believe God is real, and that we as humans are individually known and cared for by Him. This is the foundation for universal human rights, and even some atheists worry about what will happen to these values if faith in God wanes.

                      • kgarten 540 days ago
                        I am raised catholic and go to church regularly. Universal human rights do not come from Christianity alone. If you take the tree example, let's make a mix of citrus, lemon, and orange. If you say it's just orange that's hiding the truth and makes citrus and lemon people understandable angry :) if you then say it's lemon-orange tradition, the citrus people get angry and the lemon people might feel alienated. Just saying. I recommend Nathan the Wise from Lessing for a read.

                        Holland was raised in the Christian church by his devout Anglican mother ... wikipedia Citation from Holland : "I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian"

                        So he does not believe in God, yet he defines himself as Christian :) I said Christian author, no contradiction there.

                        I also recommend Superior from Angela Saini as a read.

                        You don't need God to believe in Universal Human Rights and Ethics. Seeing the recent abuse scandals, in the catholic church I find organized religion is a bigger problem ...

                        We disagree fundamentally. Still I appreciate that you take the time to reply. Something, I really like about hackernews :)

                        • PathOfEclipse 540 days ago
                          Re: You don't need God to believe in Universal Human Rights and Ethics.

                          That's certainly true, at least for now, and Holland himself states: "Much of intellectual culture in the west over the past 150 years has been an attempt by various people who no longer believe in the Christian God to find a justification for the beliefs that derive from Christianity." He refers in particular to secular humanism as an attempt to do just that. I just don't think that will end well.

                          I also think you did a good job alluding to why this discussion matters when you said," in the catholic church I find organized religion is a bigger problem." I believe that participation in organized Christian religion is important to the continuity of our civilization, and that Christian organizations have done far more good than harm on the net balance. Also, evil things happen in every institution: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/forgotten-study-abuse-in-s.... Institutions can and do tilt towards corruption, and therefore need continual cleansing and renewal.

                          There has been an assault on Christianity, both against the general religion and the relevant physical organizations, for a long time, by the intellectual class. A lot of the negativity people feel towards these organizations today is manufactured by university professors, the news media, entertainment industry, and so on. I think believers should fight back. Not only do we have the truth on our side, but a rich history of good things accomplished through our religion and religious organizations.

                          • marcus_holmes 539 days ago
                            Fascinating discussion. I'd just like to chip in that in Europe, this is a very outlandish position to take. Christianity is not a central part of our civilisation in Europe, or in fact any organised religion at all.

                            Even in the UK, which has a state religion, the idea of making a political decision based on a religious belief would be rejected by the electorate.

                            So the contention that "we need christianity for our civilisation to survive" is overblown at least.

                          • kgarten 539 days ago
                            Who is this intellectual class, that makes this organized assault? Can you name figureheads and their organizations?

                            " Not only do we have the truth on our side, ..." That sounds very extremist to me. I have my beliefs yet would never claim that the objective truth is on my side. In my opinion, it's also counter a scientific mindset and worldview.

                            What you are writing sounds a lot like Cultural Marxism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

                            I don't know what is true or not, yet at least from the evidence presented in the wikipedia article, I see very little basis for your claims.

                  • kgarten 540 days ago
                    Yes, I know, the Washington Post article ... This is conjecture from Alan Bullock, several historians disagree with him ... The wikipedia article is much more accurate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitle...

                    It's interesting how much you know about the internal intentions of a human without knowing his language and I guess without ever have read a speech or book by him.

                    I studied the 3rd Reich ever year in high school, I read Hitlers speeches and am familiar with also my personal family history. I could talk with a lot of eye witnesses even people who met Hitler. I can tell you that this is conjecture.

                    Oh I feared you use Judeo-Christian ... there is no Judeo-Christian tradition in Europe. Jews were outcast and regarded as second class citizens or as none at all ... (here also Hitler is more continuing a tradition than breaking it, building on antisemitic sentiments to execute the Holocaust). It's a term that was coined in the US and mostly established during the 2nd world war.

                    https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/legal-and-political-ma...

                    In Germany, we usually refer to the Abrahamic religions and traditions and beliefs. Again, same as with "Western" it's interesting what you are excluding with using that term of Judeo-Christian (also it's very contested under Jewish friends of mine ... they find it offensive).

                    History and progress is complex. If somebody claims sth. gave "singularly ... rise to" ... "among other things, the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, and the constitution of the United States." I'm highly skeptical, especially if only "Western."

                    In terms of scientific progress, I recommend https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Us-Humans-Transformed-Another...

                    • PathOfEclipse 540 days ago
                      Just because you don't like a term doesn't mean the term isn't describing something real. And, just because a term was invented to describe something in the past, doesn't mean the term isn't describing something real. And, finally, every term both includes and excludes, else it has no meaning!

                      Your linked encyclopedia article looks very biased and misinformed. For one, Wikipedia states the term has been used since the 1800s. I also personally don't think "Judeo-Christian" excludes Muslims, who, to my knowledge, inherit this tradition by believing in parts of both the Old and New Testaments: From https://www.wikiislam.net/wiki/Portal:_Islam_and_the_Judeo-C...

                      "The Qur'an makes constant reference to the stories of the Judeao-Christian tradition. The references are familiar and sometimes in passing, and assume a great deal of familiarity on the part of the listeners. The audienceof the Qur'an was clearly one well-acquainted with the stories themselves and the Qur'an itself says that it is a "reminder" (73:19) of the message which has come before. The stories referenced are not only from the Bible, but come from a wide variety of literary traditions within ancient near east Christianity and Judaism such as the Alexander Romances, saints lives, and the Talmud."

                      Historians disagree about everything, and everything is up for conjecture because the man isn't alive today, and we can't read his mind. That said, here is some more evidence:

                      From: https://www.independent.com/2011/04/29/hitler-hated-christia...

                      Martin Bormann, one of Hitler’s closest and most influential aides, declared that National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable, and Hitler himself said that Christianity was a religion of fools and “old women.”

                      Hitler declared that “The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity…. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.”

                      And from: https://thenewamerican.com/hitler-and-christianity/

                      According to Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi leader of the German youth corps that would later be known as the Hitler Youth, “the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement” from the beginning, though “considerations of expedience made it impossible” for the movement to adopt this radical stance officially until it had consolidated power.

                      Really, this is just common sense. Hitler was many things, but a clumsy politician was not one of them. He knew that until he had “consolidated power,” he would have to erect a façade for a Christian people and the Church; this is probably why virtually all his pro-Christian statements were rendered publicly and before he had closed his iron fist around the German neck.

                      • kgarten 540 days ago
                        Christianity, Judaism and Islam make constant references to each other, as they are the Abrahamic religions. They share similar value systems, prophets and texts. Read Natan the Wise for a nice fable about that ;)

                        I think you didn't mean the term as such but the value system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Christian_ethics

                        I thought you used the term Judeo-Christian tradition focusing on values (e.g. ethics). The 1800s meaning does not really make sense as it refers to Jewish converts to Christianity not to shared values. The shared value idea is from the America's in the 1940s not from Europe. It was never used in Europe like that before the time around the second world war, as Jews (and Muslims) were seen as foreign elements and discriminated against for most of the European History. From your wikipedia article:

                        "Historian K. Healan Gaston has stated that the term emerged as a descriptor of the United States in the 1930s, when the US sought to forge a unified cultural identity in an attempt to distinguish itself from the fascism and communism in Europe."

                        If you don't think that the term "Judeo-Christian Ethics or Values" excludes Islam, maybe we can term it "Judeo-Muslim Ethics" ... Christianity is in the middle, should be ok for you to use the new term ;) It's shorter and everybody knows that Christianity has to be included in it. My point why not use the older, correct term "Abrahamic"? I think people should be precise with their language.

                        There are people that argue that Islam has a different value system and does not fit in with the other two religions. Yet, those are usually extreme right wing. Angela Saini takes their view point pretty well apart. Being christian and having religious Jewish and Muslim friends in Europe, I feel we share more than most Evangelicals I met in the U.S. (I just say intelligent design ... ). None of my European friends has any trouble with Evolution (and trusting in Science ... because it works ;)

                        • PathOfEclipse 539 days ago
                          I suppose I prefer Judeo-Christian because:

                          1) I think the most important piece is the Christian part.

                          2) Judeo- at least recognizes the heritage of Judaism Christianity owes much to.

                          3) I am not convinced that the Islamic religion has uniquely contributed anything of significant value morally or religiously beyond religions that came before it, namely, Judaism and Christianity. Inheriting good values is far different than contributing your own values to society. I haven't read Saina's book or studied the history of Islam much, though, to be honest, so I could be certainly missing something.

                          • kgarten 539 days ago
                            1) because you are Christian ...

                            2) do you consider how Jewish people feel, who were prosecuted, discriminated and killed by Christians, when you refer to Judeo-Christian traditional values? The early massacres in Europe on Jewish people were mostly done by Christians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism As I said, my Jewish friends get quite rattled and angry if somebody uses the term.

                            3) For one: religious tolerance: when other religions fought religious wars, Islamic countries were the first who tolerated other Abrahamic religions.

                            Also the impact of Islam and Muslims on philosophy is enormous. For example, we would have lost most of Ancient Greek texts without the Caliphate ... the Caliphate saved them and developed them when Christian countries were thinking about holy war :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_world_contributions_to...

                            They occupied Spain for a long time, brought irrigation, math (the concept of 0), geometry and a lot of other sciency stuff to Europe. You know how the Christians responded, getting all that tolerance, knowledge, and culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista#Conversions_and_ex... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition

                            Interestingly, they also forced Jews to convert ... this seems where the first citings of your used word "Judeo-Christian" comes from (the Inquisition lasted until the 1800s). Can you understand that Jewish people might not be found of you using it, now.

                            Oh and when Christians still used bloodletting to remove "evil spirits", Islamic countries had actual medicine.

                            Yet, you are probably right, they didn't contribute anything. The only contributions that count are the contributions of our tribe and what other Christian authors say about them.

                            • PathOfEclipse 532 days ago
                              A small counter, since this conversation is over, but I said "religious" contributions. Almost all the contributions you listed were non-religious in nature. I am well aware that, at one point, Muslim nations were far more advanced than Christian nations, and that we owe much to them in the realms of math, science, and the preservation of history. It's also nice to hear that they practiced religious tolerance better than Christians, too, at least at one point in history.

                              And also:

                              1) Because I have evidence of the influence of Christianity on the entire world, but no such evidence for the faith if Islam. I am not saying that evidence doesn't exist, but you yourself certainly failed to provide any.

          • sofixa 541 days ago
            > The West of Europe has a historical bias towards freedom of expression, democracy, religious freedom (arguable) etc, and that got extended to include America when it got big enough to join the party

            You're going to have to be more precise with the epoch you think that happened, but it doesn't sound true. Whenever you consider the US "got big enough to join the party" (the absolute latest I would accept is WWI), democracy was a rare thing. Name one "Western" country that was democratic, really, for more than 40 years during WWI. The closest you can get to are a few constitutional monarchies with at least lots of de jure, usually also de facto monarch power, Switzerland and San Marino.

            • tremon 540 days ago
              Name one "Western" country that was democratic, really, for more than 40 years during WWI

              That "really" gives you a lot of wiggle room to move the goalposts, since before WWI women generally weren't allowed to vote, and in many countries voting was mainly limited to the aristocracy (or other criteria). So there were no "real" late-20th century democracies anywhere in the 19th century.

              The closest you can get to are a few constitutional monarchies

              See, you're moving the goalposts already. Why would constitutional monarchies not qualify as "real"?

              So, taking the same wiggle room you have allowed yourself, there's the United Kingdom (1689), Sweden (1809), Spain (1812), Norway (1814), The Netherlands (1815), Belgium (1831), Switzerland (1848), and Portugal (1852).

              • sofixa 540 days ago
                > See, you're moving the goalposts already. Why would constitutional monarchies not qualify as "real"?

                My next sentence explains why:

                > monarchies with at least lots of de jure, usually also de facto monarch power

                Having an unelected head of state with lots of power isn't a "real" democracy, in my book. Places where the monarch could appoint a government and dissolve parliament at will, directly own colonies for personal exploitation, etc. were hardly "really" democratic, which excludes more than half your list (Spain depending on time of year, Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands,, UK, and I can't be bothered to look but fairly sure also Norway, Sweden, Denmark).

                I already mentioned Switzerland, which wasn't a monarchy (at the federal level), but yes, was democratic. There's also San Marino.

            • marcus_holmes 540 days ago
              yeah, this is all very hand-wavy from the get-go
        • bcrosby95 541 days ago
          You don't even have to go back that far. Spain was a dictatorship in the early '70s.
          • cycomanic 541 days ago
            And the US became significant supporters of Franco in later years.
            • api 541 days ago
              That was the "if it's not communist and fogs glass we support it" era of US foreign policy.
              • NoGravitas 541 days ago
                "Was"? Although now I guess it applies to geopolitical rivals, whether communist or not.
        • whitepaint 541 days ago
          > What does this mean and how is it relevant to the article or the parent comment?

          It is very relevant. Freedom of speech is one of cornerstones of the West.

          • NoGravitas 541 days ago
            Galileo will be pleased to hear it. As will Socrates.
            • kube-system 541 days ago
              The reason you know those things about those people is because your teachers (and their teachers) thought those mistakes were worth learning from.
              • NoGravitas 541 days ago
                My dude, as recently as 1921, England was imprisoning people for blasphemy[1], and the law was on the books until 2008. Throughout the history of Christendom, the usual punishment for blasphemy was death by hanging or stoning, and such hangings were common up until the turn of the 18th century[2]. "The West" is nothing special when it comes to freedom of speech.

                [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law_in_the_United_Ki...

                [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy#Punishment

                • Nomentatus 540 days ago
                  The current Pope strongly supports the return of blasphemy laws, and not just re Christian beliefs, apparently.
                • kube-system 541 days ago
                  There are places where death sentences for blasphemy are enforced today. This doesn't happen anywhere in the west.

                  While not all of the western world is as liberal about speech as the US is, when you consider both political and religious speech, the western world is squarely more progressive than other regions of the world.

                  • NoGravitas 540 days ago
                    Today? Yeah, it is. But the previous claim was that freedom of speech was some kind of essential, enduring feature of "the west". But Europe's (and its colonies') history in that regard is actually a patchwork of freedom and oppression — but mostly oppression, much like the rest of the world. Europe's trend over the past couple of hundred years has been good regarding political and religious speech, but I wouldn't base any sweeping conclusions about long-term cultural differences on that.
                  • sfjailbird 540 days ago
                    > There are places where death sentences for blasphemy are enforced today.

                    And many warmly supported (or even placed in power) by 'the West', funny how that works.

            • sofixa 541 days ago
              Good question, by what measure is Ancient Greece "Western"?
              • wombatpm 541 days ago
                It’s not China or the Indus River valley?
                • sofixa 540 days ago
                  By that logic Albania, Bosnia, Libya, Chad are also "Western"?
        • golemotron 541 days ago
          > What does this mean and how is it relevant to the article or the parent comment?

          Freedom of speech does not exist outside the Western tradition.

        • kmeisthax 541 days ago
          "Non-western" was originally used by right-wingers complaining about tolerance of Muslims, but given that a lot of people really far out on the right actually want to tear down Western institutions, it seems more like them making a smug grin[0] and saying "You like theocracy, don't you Mr. Liberal?" nowadays.

          [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpwDP3IIEAAV9pK.jpg

        • PathOfEclipse 541 days ago
          undefined
      • brightball 541 days ago
        There’s an entire satire site that categorizes parody articles they wrote which later became reality.
        • panxyh 541 days ago
          Would you be so kind?
    • meragrin_ 541 days ago
      Have you seen the content posted? The only thing I've been able to find about it does not give me the feeling the page was parody.
      • alistairSH 541 days ago
        The parody page heading was "We no crime."

        Content included things like "Stay inside and catch up with family day" as a crime-prevention measure.

        The Parma PD arrested him for disrupting the police, which as far as I can tell was based on a whopping 12 minutes spent answering phone calls from other residents who couldn't distinguish parody from real life any more.

        • neaden 541 days ago
          Except under oath the cops said no one actually thought it was real, they just called to complain.
          • alistairSH 541 days ago
            Yah, that officer is a real POS. He initially testified they thought the page was real. Only changed his tune under appeal.
          • seba_dos1 541 days ago
            Sounds like it's the complainers who should be prosecuted for unnecessary use of police line.
            • vuln 541 days ago
              Eh. They didn’t call 911 they called the non emergency number.

              Calling and asking about the Facebook page would be the same as calling an asking what hours a certain precinct is open or a noise complaint.

              Staffing the non emergency line is an administrative duty not an operational duty. One person staffs this desk. Their only job is to take non emergency calls on shift.

              Edit: I would be more understanding if 911 was effectively DDoS by callers inquiring about the Facebook page causing real emergencies and help to be delayed. But this is not the case at all. The people did the right thing by calling the non emergency number and the police arrest a guy because they were forced to answer questions about a parody Facebook page.

              • vkou 541 days ago
                If we're going to arrest people over spewing bullshit on Facebook, that causes disruption of public services and welfare, I have a very long list.
      • jaclaz 541 days ago
        This is an image of part of it:

        https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/city-parma.pn...

        and another one:

        https://static1.therichestimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/up...

        as I see it, it is not particularly subtle.

        • classified 540 days ago
          Black humor is rarely subtle.
      • frumper 541 days ago
        Even if not parody, it's not a crime to post made up stuff on Facebook.
        • nvrspyx 541 days ago
          If it's libelous, couldn't it be? I'm not saying that's the case here, but wanted to point out that defamation is a crime, or tort depending on the case.
          • hermitdev 541 days ago
            Libel & defemation are civil matters, not criminal.

            Edit: bad autocorrect

            • nvrspyx 541 days ago
              Some states have criminal defamation statutes, which is why I mentioned it depends on the case. I could've made that more clear though. As another comment mentioned, Ohio isn't one of those states though.

              My main point was that sometimes "making stuff up online" is a crime, or in the least, unlawful. And as far as colloquialism goes, crime, illegal, and unlawful are used interchangeably by the general public.

            • cestith 541 days ago
              They also require a statement presented as fact, not opinion, which is false and designed to harm someone's reputation.
          • Turing_Machine 541 days ago
            In the United States (but not necessarily elsewhere), public officials have a very high bar to overcome if they're making a defamation claim.

            As First Brother Billy Carter once put it, "You can call a congressman a no-good sumbitch and he can't do anything about it."

          • alistairSH 541 days ago
            Ohio doesn't have a criminal libel statute (13 states do, and most are no usually enforced).
        • meragrin_ 541 days ago
          If it induces panic or a crime, sure it is.
      • jjulius 541 days ago
        >The only thing I've been able to find about it does not give me the feeling the page was parody.

        Can you share?

        • daanlo 541 days ago
          Read the pdf by the onion. It has examples of the content, which is clearly parody e.g. his post suggested that the police is providing free abortions to teenagers in a mini van. I guess these days the line between parody and nut case is thin ;)
          • jjulius 541 days ago
            I was just hoping that OP could clarify what didn't seem like parody to them. ;)
          • compiler-guy 541 days ago
            Publishing nutcase craziness also isn't a crime.
        • meragrin_ 541 days ago
          Not really worth bothering. It was a single picture which showed only a small part which was an exact copy. No real content.
  • yalogin 541 days ago
    The police in the US have become too powerful, too uncontrollable. There seems to be no accountability. If the department and union wants to, they can defend and cover up any crime committed by their folks. It's very odd that majority of the people think this is ok. This is just another case where the department knowingly did the illegal thing, but the courts are protecting them too. Overall it's quite appalling.
    • stainablesteel 540 days ago
      there's a lot wrong in the the fundamentals the us had been founded on recently

      your data constantly being collected and sold is a violation of unwarranted searches

      actors like twitter/cloudfare/etc playing morality police about what opinions you're allowed to express on what should be considered a public common

      needing to write diversity statements for scientific grant funding is a violation of the separation of church and state

      and the police having no need answer as accountable to the courts shows a serious lack of checks and balances

      but i think the errors are becoming more obvious to the ever-growing internet-raised generations as they get older and there's going to not only a majority of people realizing this, but there will also be rockstar solutions to all of these things within the next 10-20 years, society will snap back to where it should be as long as people speak openly about these things. i don't believe a dystopian future is the final destination

    • fallingfrog 541 days ago
      Well, once you put a uniform on someone and a gun in their hand, they instantly become an angelic figure of pure virtue. /s
  • debacle 541 days ago
    A friend of mine recently graduated from college with some amount of debt.

    He put up a "lemonade and tequila" stand outside of his home, with an "out of stock" sign under "tequila." It was silly and a bit childish.

    Some time later he received a notice from the state that he was selling liquor without a license. His hearing is next month.

    • boppo1 540 days ago
      I mean, good luck to the state trying to prove he actually sold tequila.
  • Stagnant 541 days ago
    There really is no excuse for holding people in jail for longer than a day for cases like this, where no violence or big monetary fraud is involved. If the police truly thought that a crime had happened, the appropriate response would have been to call the guy in for questioning and let him go after that. Four days in a jail cell is pretty fucked up.
    • standardUser 541 days ago
      No person should be detained or held at all unless there's reason to believe they will engage in imminent violence or other major crimes.
    • bedast 540 days ago
      It's a plain and clear violation of his first amendment protections of free speech. There's no excuse for holding people in jail for any period of time for this. Even being detained for a short period of time is a civil rights violation.
  • ttyprintk 541 days ago
  • shagie 541 days ago
  • cm42 541 days ago
    People clamoring for satire warnings and such should be placed on a watchlist of some kind, or perhaps enrolled in some kind of re-educational program, lest they mistake a book of jokes for an instruction manual and get somebody hurt or something.
    • c3534l 540 days ago
      It really is an indication that someone lacks critical thinking skills. To read satire and never question its validity implies they accepted it uncritically, never asked if it was plausible or reasonable, never thought if the source was trustworthy, never thought to get an independent view. The inability to understand sarcasm and irony really does speak poorly of a person's ability to navigate the world of information overload we live in.
    • TMWNN 540 days ago
      As one who's been reading The Onion for a very, very, very long time, the amicus brief is a masterpiece and I hope it is studied in law schools and English classes everywhere. But I wonder how many of the commenters feverishly denouncing qualified immunity, and smugly telling themselves "Boy, those Parma police officers are real idiots", insist on and/or 100% require a "/s" or "lol" in any joke, satire, or parody to "get it"?
    • 6stringmerc 540 days ago
      Til Tok trends have a way of working themselves out one way or another.
  • cb321 541 days ago
    A few background links that I dug up after reading the NYT article and the actual (hilarious!) Onion amicus brief linked to by @zerovox [1] that may be of broader interest given the ongoing discussion here:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
    
        https://www.cleveland.com/court-justice/2017/10/man_arrested_for_creating_fake.html
    
    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33081046
  • Pxtl 541 days ago
    Even setting aside the particulars of the case, it seems obvious to me that local police forces should be required to have conflict-of-interest rules regarding their own critics, and should be deferring to an alternate police force in such cases, especially in the USA where you have many overlapping police forces available such as the State and FBI.
    • CobrastanJorji 541 days ago
      Sure. Police misconduct should be primarily investigated by anybody but that police department, and prosecution decisions should be made by anybody other than the prosecutors that police department regularly partners with. Congress shouldn't investigate its own ethics violations.

      Same with all government things, really. I think we really need some sort of "executive integrity" department whose sole mandate is investigating and prosecuting people generally considered out of reach of the justice system. Judges, legislators, attorneys general, etc.

      • LocalH 541 days ago
        And then we wrap it around. That "executive integrity" department operates completely transparently. Otherwise it will just become a new power target.
    • zach_garwood 541 days ago
      The "conflict of interest rule" you speak of is the First Amendment. It's been around for a while.
      • Pxtl 541 days ago
        No, the 1st amendment just says that the cops can't arrest you for speech... unless that speech is threats, fraud, etc. The 1st amendment doesn't say the cops can't punitively arrest you because they don't like your statements if they can find some other justification for it, regardless of the conflict of interest. Police have discretion on enforcement.
        • sponaugle 540 days ago
          "Police have discretion on enforcement." - That is perhaps one of the underlying problems. Many of the laws as written rely on 'discretion' to be functional. Nearly every driver in the US who has been driving more than a few weeks is a yet to be convicted multi-time felon.. by the very nature that the laws around driving only work when paired with sometimes arbitrary discretion. Imagine if you go over the speed limit even .1mph, which will happen to almost every car many hundreds or thousands of times per day, and you are sited for such. Consider rules like turn signals needing to be indicated 100 feet before a turn. 99.9 feet and you are violating the law and due a citation. Multiple citations and you should automatically have you license suspended. There is a never ending collection of officers saying that if they want to pull someone over, all they have to do is follow them due to it being impossible to drive with 100% legal compliance.

          Until we reduce that ability ( which is in the hands of our elected lawmakers), the movement of the 'discretion' just moves where the power target is.

          • genewitch 540 days ago
            the supreme court in 2013 or 2014 actually ruled that police cannot follow you in such a fashion to cause you to violate the vehicle code or other laws. The actual case in front of them was someone who was alternately tailgated then cut off by a police cruiser over the course of ~3 miles, and due to that did some traffic infraction. Once detained, a request to search was asked and granted and they found dozens of amphetamine pills. This happened in either Colorado or Utah.

            The decision was a very good read but i haven't been able to find it since, because i want to get something removed from my record that happened a couple of months before the supreme court decision. Ford's "tap the signal" flashes your blinker three times, which is not enough flashes to be legal in any state i've ever lived in. However, i was being tailgated on a single lane divided highway for 5 miles, and once a lane opened up, i tapped the signal, waited three flashes, and moved over. Boom. Tickets galore. Reason for stop? I didn't signal enough.

            It was like 01:30 and ourselves and the police were the only people on the road the entire time we were on it. There was no safety issue.

            Anyhow, that's an example of what the supreme court said is not probable cause. You can't manufacture it by harassing someone in a vehicle for miles.

            • etherealG 536 days ago
              I live in France. We have no probable cause. Lucky you it takes them that much effort.
  • bee_rider 541 days ago
    Interesting that they decided to sprinkle some comedy into their brief. I guess that's on brand, hopefully it doesn't hurt them.
    • marnett 541 days ago
      My understanding was it was mostly a satire of the often long winded and illegible legalese that is often on Supreme Court briefs. The section with random Latin phrases has me in stitches.
      • Doxin 538 days ago
        It's both excellent satire and a very well written argument. It's some impressive writing if you ask me.
  • exabrial 540 days ago
    Embarrassing local government is a move that is likely to land you in deep trouble. They’re already fighting for relevancy with inflated budgets; what people want are police/fire, and what they get is multimillion ugly art and payouts to the mayor’s buddies that just randomly happen to own all the construction and law firms. Crazy coincidence.
  • mabbo 540 days ago
    > The Onion intends to continue its socially valuable role bringing the disinfectant of sunlight into the halls of power... And it would vastly prefer that sunlight not to be measured out to its writers in 15-minute increments in an exercise yard.[0]

    It's funny, but it's also an incredibly important point- for the Onion this case lets them know if the police can arrest their employees because they don't like what's written.

    [0]https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/2022... (last paragraph)

  • mgbmtl 541 days ago
  • danielodievich 540 days ago
    Onion is a national, nay, worldwide treasure. I remember the furor it caused when they craigslisted their desk from the writer's room. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-onion-writers-room-table-.... Some lucky person got it, and it was a steal, too!
  • andsoitis 540 days ago
    Are the Supreme Court justices required to read the entire brief, or can they stop reading after the first few sentences?

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/2022...

    • zuminator 540 days ago
      Justices aren't required to do anything. They make up their own rules and can do whatever they want.
  • chasd00 541 days ago
    Can anyone file a brief with the court? I'd like to file one. There are too many states these days, they should eliminate three.
  • cpif 540 days ago
    From the Onion brief:

    > At bottom, parody functions by catering to a reasonable reader -- one who can tell (even after being tricked at first) that the parody is not real. If most readers of parody didn't live up to this robust standard, then there would be nothing funny about the Chinese government believing that a pudgy dictator like Kim Jong-un was the sexiest man on Earth. Everyone would just agree that it was perfectly reasonable for them to be taken in by the headline.

    > The law turns on the same reasonable-person construct. The reasonable-reader test gauges whether a statement can reasonably be interpreted as stating actual facts, thereby ensuring that neither the least humorous nor the most credulous audience dictates the boundaries of protected speech.... see also Golb v. Att'y Gen. of N.Y., 870 F.3d 89, 102 (2d Cir. 2017) ("[A] parody enjoys First Amendment protection notwithstanding that not everybody will get the joke.")

    I'm curious whether drawing any degree of public attention to the "reasonable-reader construct" will result in more nuanced discussion of misinformation/"fake news" than we normally get (in America).

    The assumption seems often to be that the reader is always most likely an unreasonable reader, and that the solution to the problem is to accommodate every information stream to unreasonable reading habits, rather than intervening in the problem of widespread credulity (if that is indeed the problem) itself.

  • Eddy_Viscosity2 540 days ago
    "qualified immunity" strikes again. What's the point of having constitutional protections if the people most likely to violate them are immune from accountability?
  • ars 540 days ago
    I really want to believe that the lawyers signed on the brief legally changed their last names in order to sound funnier.
  • labrador 540 days ago
    Just use the Tucker Carlson defense: "No rational person would think what I said was actually true"
    • tremon 540 days ago
      They did:

      > III. A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody.

  • gnu2 540 days ago
    undefined
  • dominotw 541 days ago
    undefined
    • BobbyJo 541 days ago
      Is there a difference between someone being charged with a crime for a joke, or simply having the joke removed from the platform it was posted to? I tend to think so.

      I think platform censorship is a completely different beast than government persecution and prosecution. Is it bad? maybe, but the two don't seem very comparable to me.

      • Nifty3929 540 days ago
        I agree with you - though as platforms are becoming more tightly regulated and "pressured" by various government agencies and interest groups, I believe the line is blurring. We're seeing our large corporations become de-facto arms of the government.
        • genewitch 540 days ago
          > We're seeing our large corporations become de-facto arms of the government.

          was there ever a time when they weren't? Or, if you prefer, limit it to industrial revolution to contemporary. Crony Capitalism and lobbying were decried by the "founders" and the architects of the document that the supreme court ostensibly makes its rulings based upon.

          and yet...

      • dominotw 541 days ago
        > I think platform censorship is a completely different beast than government persecution and prosecution.

        Yes but the complaint here is that of its effects on free speech. They are equivalent from that perspective, no?

        • plorkyeran 541 days ago
          No, having to worry about your content being removed and having to worry about retribution do not have equivalent effects on free speech.
      • cestith 541 days ago
        Platform censorship by the owner of the platform isn't a First Amendment issue. The FBI asserting government pressure to convince or coerce the platform to remove it is government censorship.

        Where the line is drawn between a polite request and coercion is ... tricky when you're talking about the federal government in an era of increasing pressure to regulate social media.

    • germinalphrase 541 days ago
      I share your general concern; however, "making them remove content" is factually different than "guided by the FBI" (as you phrase it). Facebook decidedly chose to remove that content. They were not coerced to do so, and MZ hasn't said otherwise.
      • Nifty3929 540 days ago
        As platforms are becoming more tightly regulated and "pressured" by various government agencies and interest groups, I believe the line is blurring. We're seeing our large corporations become de-facto arms of the government.
    • happyopossum 541 days ago
      Spending 4 days in jail is very different from having one of your FB posts removed.
  • kazinator 540 days ago
    > filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Monday.

    Like amicus, but for a third grade reading comprehension exam where dictionaries are not allowed.

  • bloomingeek 540 days ago
    Fortunately the police didn't shoot him dead in his front yard. Today's community law enforcement is out of control when it comes to common sense. With their attitude of "How dare you criticize us!" and their huge hero egos, it's a wonder all of us aren't scared to call the cops for help.