321–330 of 646 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well Obama like Trump is a celeb more than a leader. Celebs spend all day pandering to their fan clubs to survive. Leaders dont. And the US is celeb obsessed. So thats a big bug in the code.
You're getting downvoted, but it's true. Obama ushered in the age of the political personality cult. Pretty much every election from here on out is going to hinge on how well you can sell the politician's personality, and brushing aside his platform, all his shady connections and people he's aligned with. This is very much a byproduct of all the private money in election campaigning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a judge can be pressured by the government they're political. Judges (in the UK) have nothing to gain by being political. They aren't elected politically, the roles are based on merit.
Do you mean that the career of judges is never affected by politics? I think, e.g., that appointments to SCOTUS are an obvious counterexample.
Kevin Gosztola: "The United States government's mass incarceration system just lost them their case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange" - https://twitter.com/kgosztola/status/1346048531249958914 Matt Kennard, investigative journalist: "Brilliant news, but be in no doubt. This ruling is utterly chilling for investigative journalism. Baraitser sided with US prosecutors on pretty much all of their arguments. It wa…
> "Brilliant news, but be in no doubt. This ruling is utterly chilling for investigative journalism. Baraitser sided with US prosecutors on pretty much all of their arguments. It was the barbaric nature of the US penal system that saved Assange." A barbarical nature of US penal system it is, but they did not even note a prima fascie political nature of the prosecution when the defence was slashing it left, and right.…
You are correct in a way -- judges do not decide issues that do not need to be decided, and things they do say about those issues are ignored, so yes, she omitted to discuss it.
But you couldn't say she "sided with US prosecutors" on whether it was a political offence or not. If you put that language in the Extradition Act, then you would get a decision on it. It's not so much "chilling for investigative journalism" as a deficiency in the Act itself not accounting for the particular US-UK treaty language or the US' categorisation under the Act that should reflect its recent anti-democratic bent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish Snowden didn't flee the country. I'd have a completely different opinion if he stood trial.
I think he didn’t care much about your opinion of him so much as he did about what would happen to him and where he’d end up. Given what was being kept from the American people and what he knew, it’s impossible to call him paranoid or to even pass judgement on his character. He may not have been willing to give his literal life for the sake of blowing the whistle, but there really can be no question that he did give…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You lie, if they accuse you of perjury then you say "I googled it after I was asked".
Then what, for every other jury duty?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you take an absolutist, principled or binary view, then most imprisonment is a torture of some sort. It causes severe psychological distress. That's what a prison is. The differences are in the nuance, and you might call those subjective. This was an extradition hearing, not a trial. This seems to have given the judge room to justify a nuanced conclusion that doesn't extend far past this case. IDK if there's much…
> it causes severe psychological distress. That's what prison is. Depends. Some penal systems are there for "retribution" or punishment, and those match your definition. Other concepts available are rehabilitation and simply separating proven dangerous elements from society at large. Apart from the loss of freedom of movement (which I would not describe as "severe psychological distress"), there is no hard requiremen…
But hard/philosophical requirements notwithstanding, prisons tend to be what they are. The famous moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed some a "modern" prison system with some of these goals in mind, especially reform. The result was quite horrific.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, Obama claimed he sent in a team to kill him and dump his body in the ocean, during an election year, even though the French intelligence agencies said he was probably dead for at least 7 years. That seal team also died in a helicopter crash later, but it wasn't "the same seal team." Honestly I don't understand how Americans still trust our news sources today.
>dump his body in the ocean Yeah that's a bit crazy if you ask me.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/05/osama-bin-laden-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily in this area. Wikileaks has exposed a number of US war crimes that went completely unpunished, while a person who was working on behalf of Wikileaks is being prosecuted on grounds that are fairly constructed and far-fetched even by US standards. Morally speaking, even if some of Assange's actions were immoral they might be considered excusable because the perils were outweighed by the benefits of thes…
Assange literally encouraged people to infiltrate US intelligence agencies and "leak" classified intel. Let's not even get into his work laundering Russian hacked docs to damage the US, and then repeatedly lying about it. He also is credibly accused of being a rapist. The US has done some bad shit, no doubt, but that doesn't make Assange some saint. He's a bad dude.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
European colonial empires killed millions as well and faced no prosecution. Never forget what Hitler said; he said that concentration camps were not his idea instead he learnt about it from reading about British concentration camps during the Second Boer War in which thousands of Boers died.
The comparison is silly. While the Boer War concentration camps were brutal, they were nothing on par with the Nazis. In fact “concentration camp” is largely a misnomer. The sizable majority of Holocaust victims were killed in extermination camps, like Treblinka. These never even purported to hold any prisoner population, and simply murdered all prisoners immediately upon arrival. The British have no shortage of prob…
Warning: Disturbing images
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_in_the_Holocaust#/med...
