khepri

It's how authoritarians operate in every realm. No matter how fair or objective or established the process is, they will insist on playing the victim, crying wolf, and framing as an attack on "all of us" everything that might infringe on their God-given right to do whatever they want to whoever they want. It's a big part of the reason why you can't give a mouse a cookie when it comes to Nazis.

Yes, if you are certain that complying with discovery is going to expose more crimes and get you and your seditious buddies in more hot water, a good soldier like Giuliani will take the L of a default judgement, simply because he's more afraid of what his "friends" will do to him than what the justice system will do to him.

It's not easy to lose a case by default for failing to comply with discovery. You have to really work hard for the court to basically say "your conduct is so bad that you've forfeited your right to continue making a defense". But due process is still a process, and if you straight up refuse to fulfill your end of the process, and turn down the many chances to comply with discovery that the judge will give you, then this happens. Alex Jones went down for the same thing in his defamation case. These turds all think they can just buck every system or break any norm that suits them, which is why they always go down for the dumbest simplest shit in these cases like perjury, discovery, and witness tampering.

two groups of people working in the same branch of government having a meeting does sound pretty bad tbh, should probably have Jim Jordan get on that.

I agree that self harm is a tragic response to the kind of environment she was apparently in. I do not agree that this act somehow makes her "perception of the world" (whatever that very broad phrase might mean) unreasonable, or that it proves she has an "extreme personality" (again not sure what, definitionally, that is). I think perfectly normal people react in unexpected ways to extreme environments and unless you have some reason to assume otherwise I'm not sure it's reasonable to look at self harm and then default to questioning the person first and not the situation first.

Because you seem very close to implying (and I'm sure this isn't the case) that issues of "recall" "perception" "reasonableness" and "personality" makes the statements of someone who self-harms untrustworthy, suspicious, or in some way self-serving or discountable. Not saying you were consciously trying to imply that, but that's probably the cause of the downvotes.

I think this is the right take. Americans have Section 230 (for now) that quite broadly protects communications platforms from liability over what 3rd parties (users) post to their platform about Piracy. We also have the 1st Amendment which more or less protects anything you say short of direct, specific calls to commit crimes and some types of slander/libel. It's why we can say goofy shit like "now I'm not saying you should do this or encouraging anyone to do this, but if you were going to anyway here's how:..." and then talk about how to commit crimes, and get away with it. Because we're just talking about it right? No one is saying "now go do these things at my direction" we're just sharing information, innocently, not telling anyone to act a certain way...

In the EU, not so much. They have "methods and means" rules that can get platform owners in trouble for 3rd parties just posting about BitTorrent clients or providing advice like "Google X if you want to find Y" on their platform if it's smells of possible piracy. We're so used in the US to just being able to disclaim everything we say that this is a bit shocking. But talking about tools and techniques, even if you preamble with "now don't ever use these for piracy bros, ok, I don't advocate for using this advice in that way" is not going to save the user or even the platform owners from trouble. It is not just about posting direct links to pirated content or hosting/torrent sites. Maybe a point that is little-understood in the threads I've been reading on here about this.

It's almost like our made-up borders and laws are somehow at odds with the fact that, in almost all cases, anyone can access any information from any place these days, and that information is replicated and stored across the globe!

I wish other people were making this point as well. Certain content is illegal various places around the world, and I don't think anyone is saying we want the admins to risk that, but entire communities are - at worst - slightly more prone than others to having users post illegal content. If I post illegal content anywhere, sure, go ahead and remove/ban. But removing discussion of entire topics, just because those communities* might* be places where people might be a little more likely try and post such content, just isn't making sense to me. Isn't it the content, not the name of the channel, that's the issue, or am I missing something?

Point well taken, but I'd say getting the US Congress to agree to things that inconvenience the rich might be an exception. I really wish we could get the ball rolling on that in a self-sustaining, self-amplifying way that compounded to larger and larger changes and more and more public support. But that just isn't how my government has worked in my lifetime in my experience.

I'm all for taxing and regulating the hell out of these totally unneeded luxuries, but air travel is 2% of global emissions, and private jets are 2% of that. They are a pure luxury, and so are a good target for emissions reduction, but this would be just one of hundreds of similarly-sized initiatives needed to move the needle at this point. It's also not a "soft target" since we'd have to take something away from the rich that they like, which costs a lot of time and political capital that then can't be used elsewhere, perhaps to greater impact.

Yes, they certainly have to meet requirements for air exchange. And if you define "airtightness" as that, then yes, the ones that met that definition met that definition. What they are not is the common definition of airtightness, as in a sealed glass jar, steel can, scuba tank, or submarine, which if you look at the comments here was what was confusing a lot of people. I don't think anyone was contending that there aren't tests that these houses have to pass, just that the word airtightness, as understood by laypeople, isn't an accurate term to describe these homes.