• 2 Posts
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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • If she stays on and the federal court holds her in contempt and punishes her, maybe Donald will pardon her, so she still gets her money. So no, it’s not moral.

    What could she do? She could say what exactly the feds are doing wrong, for example, with federal officers’ names and dates and details. Create the record. She could refuse to file motions supporting the feds. Then the people would win those uncontested cases. Those would be relatively moral. But she made it about herself, and that’s hogwash.



  • What you’re positing here is a view of life that Margaret Thatcher loved. The idea is, “There is no society. There are no laws. There is no oversight. Everything, all responsibility, all of it is 1000% individual.”

    Of course in reality that’s nonsense. We live in a world with laws that are sometimes enforced, where governments sometimes protect us, because we want them to, because that’s good for us all.

    But even if you believe in Thatcher’s view, then you have the problem of corporations. You can’t seriously argue that we should be responsible for everything ourselves, as individuals, and also that corporations should exist, because they are anti-individual.



  • If companies are lying in their advertising to the general public, then that is something the companies are responsible for. You can blame the victims, but that’s kind of stupid because there are so many people in the world who are not technically savvy. They don’t have the resources, background, knowledge, and skills to evaluate whether what the company is telling them is true. That’s why there are laws designed to protect consumers from lying companies.

    Would it be great if everyone was an expert in everything? Yes. Are they? No. They never will be. That’s why we have laws.




  • There are many reasons why the executive branch (pigs, DAs, presidents, etc.) often don’t comment. It all depends on the details of what they might say, though.

    If they say “he’s guilty!” or “she’s guilty!” then there is a higher chance of corrupting the jury pool. This is especially true for national-level leaders (e.g., Luigi’s case).

    If they discuss specific facts, but it turns out those are contested claims, then the same issue comes up, but it’s usually less of an issue, if they phrased everything properly.

    If there are details of the current investigation status that might tip off potential criminals, they probably don’t want to say those. If they do, there’s some risk that they could face civil suits, depending on the exact details (e.g., Karen Read’s lawsuit).

    Of course they can comment on things, and often they should, because the public sometimes really ought to get information on a given topic. In those situations, they need to do what Trump’s people never do, which is write their script and then triple check it for the above points, and only then read it out loud for the camera.

    And above all, if they want to avoid negative consequences, they should definitely avoid outright falsehoods. It can be acceptable to say “Our agent reported that [situation]…”, for example, because then the leader is talking about what they heard happened, and not about what the situation actually was.


  • It will be interesting to see if this goes anywhere. It looks like the claims are based on specific aspects of California law (put simply: wiretapping, privacy, and deceptive business practices). Do they have a strong case? I don’t know, not worth my personal time to research state law on these issues.

    Is there enough to go to court? Certainly the lawyers think so, and I agree. If Meta is claiming E2EE (which it is) and then immediately undercutting that by re-transmitting large numbers of messages to itself (which is alleged), that sure feels deceptive to me, and it’s easy to think that a jury might agree.