421–428 of 428 posts
Wow that was some article. If these kind of things happened in my country, I would get the fuck out of my country. Actually, I didn't like the way the UK was going, so when the opportunity came about, I moved.
To where did you move?
End of the day, swat teams exist because the guys on the department like cool toys, and the Feds pay for them via grant programs. My local police department has a "command center" rv and telescopic lookout post that the Feds paid like $3M for. The machine guns are usually bought with seized drug money, and tactical training paid for try the Feds. Most cities don't need paramilitary squads, so they end up using them f…
I think a point you may not be considering is that the reason why they use these paramilitary squads for stupid shit is not just to have fun, but instead to justify the purchase of all of this gear and training in the first place. If you never use the stuff then it stands to reason that it may not make the budget in the future (assuming budgeting competence).
What they DO need to justify is the overtime and the extra pay for being in the SWAT detail. That's where driving tanks through buildings to liberate and euthanize chickens comes in.
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So for now, in the Fourth Circuit, sending a SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Oh, it goes much, much farther than that. The US Supreme Court has ruled (see Raich ) that the federal government is justified in sending an armed raid into a terminally ill old lady's home because she allegedly was growing six marijuana plants under her doctor's supervisio…
> if the court had not ruled that way, a pending related case (Stewart) would have permitted felons to home-build their own machine-guns This is false. The related case would have left machine-gun building a matter of State law. Pure-Federalism is not the only possible form of governance, and it's not the US Constitution's approved form.
We were talking about federal laws and courts. I assume that in a short blog post I'm not expected to address the proliferation of overlapping jursidictional priorities and conflicts. But since you insist on taking the discussion where it wasn't going...
Fact is, majority of US states do permit machinegun ownership, so long as it complies with federal law; thus if federal law permits felons building machineguns (so long as it remains in-state), majority of states would not prohibit it. Now that the discussion has clarified that the remaining prohibitions would occur in a minority of more than four dozen states, and that the federal government would have at least had no say in the matter (as opposed to compulsive legalization in all encompassed jurisdictions), and that the discussion had not been addressing state laws (or if it did, it was that the applicable state ALLOWED the activity), that for most practical purposes the one-sentence summary of the horribly verbose & convoluted verdict in question and its consequences was sufficiently accurate?
(Pardon me. I'm getting increasingly irritated by exchanges that amount to: "X." "X? You're WRONG because you didn't address minor tangential issues Y, Z, P, D, and Q in comprehensive detail, all of which had little to do with the discussion at hand.")
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> Wait, what? If citizen's lied for each other in investigations, they'd be prosecuted. What, the Internal Affairs division just doesn't exist? Does it not have enough power? Is that what's really being argued here? Or is this just feel-good we're-the-good-guys they're-the-bad-guys rhetoric intended to undermine what capabilities they have, cause them to feel threatened and insecure in the midst of the citizenry they…
Maybe you should avoid letting your temper get the best of you with such emotional outbursts as: "fuck people like sneak," on Hacker News. If you can't control your temper, why are you even participating in the discussion here? Personal attacks like that aren't acceptable here, and I'd think you would know that by now after three plus years. It's disgusting to see that level of discourse here.
Don't sweat it. I don't.
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Maybe you should avoid letting your temper get the best of you with such emotional outbursts as: "fuck people like sneak," on Hacker News. If you can't control your temper, why are you even participating in the discussion here? Personal attacks like that aren't acceptable here, and I'd think you would know that by now after three plus years. It's disgusting to see that level of discourse here.
Using a personal attack to rebuke an alleged personal attack is not what I'd call a convincing argument. > If you can't control your temper, why are you even participating in the discussion here? Because http://xkcd.com/386/ Stop being wrong and I'll go away. Seriously, if you want to whine about the level of discourse, then you're welcome to start with the person I originally responded to. But you won't, will you? B…
It's about as far from an emotional outburst as one can get.
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We (US residents) haven't posted annotated lists because this is in our face via newspapers and TV news and viral videos passed around on the Internet. http://hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/29-black-p... Here's one take, which is focused on black folks shot and killed over the past year. Note how many were armed.
I wrote a response here, but with the current state of government surveillance programs, I thought it was better to remove it.
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So your point is not that police actually do have a duty to protect you, but the legal precedent cited to show this did not do so? I have to wonder why even bother to argue that point? It strikes me as debating whether the link currently hitting you with a 10gbps DDOS uses optic or electric signal transfer, it doesn't change the facts of the issue at all. Politics and law are sideshows to the material facts of physic…
I think you need to read about the case a little more before you start arguing. Warren, and many cases before it, have held that the police have a responsibility to protect the public at large, and to do so uniformly. The police do not have a duty to protect you specifically unless they have told you they are going to protect you. This means they are not liable for preventing a crime from happening to you. That's all…