The Trump Presidency VI: Stormy Weather

They trend the posts to people that have shown interest, not necessarily to everyone.

I do agree my analogy was poor. There is no good analogy.

 

Yes I would, if the city sold canvas and stood by as that canvas was used for libel. But cities don't sell canvas. If they did, they would surely monitor their use more carefully than Facebook does.

 

Trump is trying to find a landing place in the military for McMaster that won’t be embarrassing. A 4-star position. So Trump can replace him.

 

My heart jumped for a moment, then I realized you weren't being literal.

 

Drop him off at a NOW convention and see what happens.

 

If memory serves, (which it doesn't always but, there we are), he supported the peace talks and which continued the Vietnam war so he could say it hadn't ended when the election started, causing the deaths of thousands of young American servicemen in the process.

 

If the city actively encouraged the graffiti (which FB clearly has done for a decade or more), monetized the graffiti and profitted off the graffiti...then yes I would.

There is no analogy, but Facebook is a business and should treated as such. That means being responsible (i.e., liable) for their "product."

 

You mean like gun manufacturers?

 

Music sharing platforms can also work as an analogy, they facilitated music sharing but they were not the owners of the pirated music, yet courts still found them liable of copy right laws violation.

Libel is a crime, but doesn't it have to be in purpose to be against the law?

Can they be charged for spreading libel even if they may not know if it qualifies as that?

 

I won't touch the legal issues, Every time I do I say something that is wrong!

 

The practice of defining people with no visible employment as criminals goes back to the time of the black death and continued up to the mid 1800's in the guise of various vagrancy acts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrancy_(people)#United_Kingdom

In eighteenth century Britain, people suspected of vagrancy could be detained by the constable or watchman and brought before a magistrate who had the legal right to interview them to determine their status.[16] If declared vagrant, they were to be arrested, whipped, and physically expelled from the county by a vagrant contractor, whose job it was to take them to the edge of the county and pass them to the contractor for the next county on the journey.[17] This process would continue until the person reached his or her place of legal settlement, which was often but not always their place of birth.

In 1824, earlier vagrancy laws were consolidated in the Vagrancy Act 1824 (UK) whose main aim was removing undesirables from public view. The act assumed that homelessness was due to idleness and thus deliberate, and made it a criminal offence to engage in behaviours associated with extreme poverty. The Poor Law was the system for the provision of social security in operation in England and Wales from the 16th century until the establishment of the Welfare State in the 20th century.​

When you're trying to pretend you have a decent society you don't want to have a load of poor people spoiling the conceit.

 

GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE!
(or some such nonsense)

There is an awful article in the Federalist on the topic.
Gun control would "only" lead to Acid attacks, "knifings," and bombings.

Gun Control Across The World Only Leads To Acid, Knifings, And Bombings
http://thefederalist.com/2018/02/21/gun-control-across-world-leads-acid-knifings-bombings/

 

Except that the Black Code's vagrancy laws were not about employment or being poor ... they were about being Black. The vagrancy laws were pushed precisely so that Black people could be legally enslaved by plantation owners across the south. It wasn't like the people snatched up were being given hearings to determine their status to begin with, in the vast majority of cases. For goodness' sake, a war had recently been fought over the issue. Not quite the same thing as being sent home to your place of legal settlement (which I am sure was a disgusting practice in its own right).

 

Libel is NOT a crime, at least not in the United States.

Libel is a tort, that is civil wrong for which a remedy may be available. It is an intentional tort.

The tortfeasor (defendant in the lawsuit) must have published a false and defamatory written statement about the victim (plaintiff in the lawsuit), that was "harmful" to the victim.

I do not wish to get into the weeds on the subject, but there are four elements to the tort of Libel (or slander)

Elements of Libel
•Written false and defamatory statement made by the defendant
•Statement was of and concerning the plaintiff
•Statement was publicized
•(Usually) Damages have to be proved damages regarding the written defamatory statement made by the defendant

 

There is also a higher threshold to prove a case if it is a public person. So if someone trashes my reputation by lying about how crap I am at my job, and that gets me fired and makes it hard for me to get another job, I might have a case. If someone criticizes an elected official, the bar would be higher and they would have to prove a higher degree of malice.

 

It was pretty amazing how out of touch and inane/insane that session was.

 

Yes, that is absolutely the case!

 

Awesome conclusion, with a connection to @The Jitty Slitter 's point...

So, what can America do to address its mass shooting epidemic? First, America needs to have a frank conversation with Hollywood about the gratuitous violence that routinely sweeps the silver screen. Today’s youth are exposed to a massive number of ever more realistic shooting scenes, and that needs to change.

Second, America’s leaders need to have a frank discussion with video game manufacturers as to the gratuitous level of violence and shootings in ever more realistic video games. Finally, Americans need to understand that mass shootings are a symptom of a cultural problem, not of the freedom to own a gun. If anything, Americans should be discussing prevalence of gratuitous violence in the culture, not how to implement stricter gun control laws. The country needs to stop its moral decay and return to a focus on well-functioning nuclear families.

In conclusion, I really do wish that gun control could work to resolve today’s terrorist bombings and other mass-killings. Sadly though, in this age, directions to create all kinds of deadly low-tech weapons of mass destruction are readily available on the internet. In the end, no matter where in the world I have been, gun control has not only failed to solve the problem of violence, but has also often created a so-called cure that sometimes turns out to be worse than the disease.
​

Bleeping bigsoccer won't let me quote @bigredfutbol , but yeah. I've read a few productively provocative pieces from the Federalist, but this is one just plain dumb.

 

And here I was thinking the Murphy Brown reboot seemed outdated

 

Yeah, I get that. I was just saying that that type of thinking, (that people had an ''unacceptable' quality), was practised over several centuries and was used as a means to punish those society deemed unworthy in some way.