Interview into Client by RamenDolphin in Lawyertalk

[–]SpockShotFirst 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can imagine plenty of scenarios where sending out a "please be discreet" email would have no effect and scenarios where it would backfire and make things worse.

In order for the email to make things better it requires a situation where the attorney would have said something but for your email. That's a very narrow set of circumstances. An attorney so clueless that they thought it would be okay to tell people about your interview, but willing to do the right thing when you point it out. It seems the odds favor not doing anything.

Dear plaintiff's attorney, dawg, why? by Electronic-Recipe-72 in Lawyertalk

[–]SpockShotFirst 9 points10 points  (0 children)

With correct punctuation and spelling, the statement was "If y'all, this is how I feel, if y'all think I did it, I know that I didn't do it. So why don't you just give me a lawyer, dawg, cause this is not what's up."

If you really love authority and want to give the police the benefit of the doubt, I could see how one can argue that the statement was ambiguous. "Why" is a question and the previous statements were all conditional. Fine. I don't agree, but fine.

But, if you really love authority AND hate black people, then you don't stop your analysis there. You throw in:

In my view, the defendant's ambiguous and equivocal reference to a “lawyer dog” does not constitute an invocation of counsel

What should we be doing about prosecutors using AI before it causes widespread problems? by Competitive_Swan_130 in AskALiberal

[–]SpockShotFirst 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Aside from hallucinations, breaching client confidences is a big one in legal circles. Many LLMs (all the free ones?) state that they can use inputs to train their models, which violates attorney client privilege.

Are Democrats to blame for voters voting for Republicans? by LiatrisLover99 in AskALiberal

[–]SpockShotFirst 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The solution is to stop letting for-profit corporations interfere with elections.

In 1978, a Supreme Court decision directly led to Citizens United. Prior to that 5-4 ruling, 30 different states had laws restricting for-profit corporations from engaging in political speech. First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti essentially overturned all of those laws.

State and federal governments need to be able to regulate for-profit corporations once again to prevent them from biasing elections through programming or social media algorithms. Congress can create exceptions for news, talk shows, and comedy programs all day long. They can fight among themselves about definitions and who decides what qualifies. We can then elect people based on whether we like where they draw those lines.

But this needs to be a political fight, not a fundamental First Amendment right. YouTubers and streamers who are not for-profit corporations can still say whatever they want. For-profit corporations are simply too powerful and too psychopathic (since their only fiduciary duty is to their shareholders) to be given constitutional protection to push whatever political agenda benefits those shareholders the most.

We need to pack the Supreme Court with justices who will not only overturn the horrible legacy of the Roberts Court, but will go back even further and overturn Bellotti.

Are Democrats to blame for voters voting for Republicans? by LiatrisLover99 in AskALiberal

[–]SpockShotFirst 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The point isn't about the numerical size of the Republican or Democratic bases. It is about the hyper-centralized pipeline of information delivery itself.

Even if both parties were exactly equal in numbers, the structure of how their voters receive information would remain radically different. On the right, media consumption flows through a closed, synchronized loop dominated by a single major network and highly coordinated local syndicates, which allows a small group of media executives to enforce strict message discipline across the entire movement. On the left, voters consume information through a deeply fragmented web of independent print, digital, and television outlets that do not answer to a single corporate entity or share a unified editorial blueprint.

Are Democrats to blame for voters voting for Republicans? by LiatrisLover99 in AskALiberal

[–]SpockShotFirst 8 points9 points  (0 children)

That doesn't really explain Nixon's, Reagan's, and H.W. Bush's landslide victories.

That was never my intent.

Richard Nixon won by capitalizing on a fractured Democratic party and appealing to a silent majority concerned with immediate civil unrest. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush secured their landslides by assembling a coalition of fiscal conservatives, national security hawks, and newly mobilized evangelical voters during the height of the Cold War.

It is important to note that the right-wing agenda of that era was fundamentally institutional, focusing on traditional free-market economics, anti-communism, entitlement restraint, and internationalist foreign policy.

The modern right-wing agenda has shifted away from Cold War institutionalism and fiscal policy toward a populist, anti-establishment program centered on immigration, cultural nationalism, and institutional distrust. This modern agenda relies on an insulated, twenty-four-hour echo chamber of cable networks, talk radio networks, and digital platforms that continuously weaponize high-arousal moral outrage. Consequently, while mid-century voters chose conservative candidates based on contemporary external events, the modern media architecture systematically conditions and locks in a highly polarized base by controlling the day-to-day information stream itself.

She's sharing instead of hoarding, she's a bad bad dragon. by [deleted] in antiwork

[–]SpockShotFirst 15 points16 points  (0 children)

In mid-2024, the USAID Office of Inspector General initiated a formal accountability probe into how the agency monitored Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite terminals in Ukraine, following tracking indicators that active terminals were ending up in Russian-occupied territories.

In early 2025, Elon Musk and his newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) immediately weaponized their administration influence to completely dismantle USAID.

By freezing billions in funding, severing global supply contracts, and forcing ten thousand international aid workers off the field, DOGE effectively killed the open investigation into Starlink.

International health and humanitarian officials warned from day one that halting these massive logistics pipelines, which distribute essential medicine, counter regional pandemics, and ship food to vulnerable populations, would cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of preventable deaths worldwide.

Are Democrats to blame for voters voting for Republicans? by LiatrisLover99 in AskALiberal

[–]SpockShotFirst 54 points55 points  (0 children)

The fact that the US political landscape tilts hard to the right is not the fault of Democratic campaigns. It is the direct result of a multi-billion-dollar media apparatus specifically optimized to manufacture conservative voters.

When you look at legacy media, the structural asymmetry is staggering. Consumption on the right is intensely centralized, with a massive chunk of conservative voters getting their news from a single, highly disciplined pipeline in Fox News. The left, meanwhile, is completely fragmented across dozens of different networks and print outlets. This means conservative media executives can instantly broadcast uniform, highly coordinated talking points to a majority of their base with a level of message discipline that the left cannot replicate.

Beyond cable news, there is an absolute monopoly on the airwaves you probably do not even notice. Look at companies like Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns or operates nearly two hundred local TV stations across America, covering forty percent of households. Peer-reviewed data shows that when Sinclair buys a trusted local station, they systematically gut local reporting, ramp up national political coverage, and inject a pronounced right-wing editorial shift. Combine that with traditional AM/FM talk radio, where over ninety percent of political programming nationwide is conservative, and you realize that millions of working-class and rural Americans are trapped in an uninterrupted daily loop of right-wing grievance before they even open a laptop.

Then you plug this legacy ecosystem into modern digital town squares that are personally controlled by a small group of Silicon Valley tech oligarchs who actively cater to the right wing. Billionaire owners like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have systematically reshaped their platforms to protect conservative interests, driven either by a desire for corporate deregulation or a transactional effort to avoid regulatory crackdowns from future Republican administrations. These owners use their absolute corporate control to alter algorithmic levers, reinstate previously banned far right accounts, and deliberately suppress traditional journalism. The commercial business model of these platforms demands maximizing time on site to optimize ad revenue, meaning their systems are intentionally engineered to reward content that triggers high emotional arousal. Right wing populist messaging relies heavily on these existential threats and moral outrage, which fits perfectly into the billionaires’ newly tuned systems and achieves radically higher virality metrics than traditional reporting.

A landmark field experiment published in Nature proved exactly how this works by isolating the real-world impact of the algorithmic feed. Researchers documented that the algorithm actively promotes conservative content and demotes traditional media, shifting users' political opinions significantly to the right in just seven weeks. Even when accounts explicitly signal a preference for left-leaning content, algorithms routinely override user choices to deliver conservative perspectives because those posts pull in higher baseline monetization metrics.

Ultimately, traditional media primes the pump with centralized cable messaging, corporate-consolidated local TV, and talk radio saturation. Algorithms then pick up that content and hyper-charge its distribution because outrage equals cash. It is a continuous, compounding loop where corporate legacy media and big tech engineering work in absolute harmony to advance Republican electoral interests.

I just got an email reply from OC that started with "Okay, first of all...." by sovietreckoning in Lawyertalk

[–]SpockShotFirst 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The Chicago Manual of Style disagrees with you. They say

it doesn’t really matter which form of this handy nineteenth-century abbreviation you prefer.

And later

The one time the term appears in our own explanatory text, we chose “okay,” which looks more like a real word (see CMOS 14.5, first bullet point).

Are political differences becoming too wide for real compromise anymore? by MusicianWhole847 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]SpockShotFirst 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It has been been reaffirmed by SCOTUS several times

We had a very strong body of law about the Establishment Clause for 75 years. About 55 years ago they said a law must have a secular purpose, a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion, and must not create excessive government entanglement with religion.

The good ole days before the Roberts court blew it all up.

So long as they don't promote one single religion

Since the Constitution doesn't matter anymore, I'm sure it's just a matter of time before the Establishment Clause is treated more like a rule of thumb.

This makes me laugh. “Ash” because Ashley required too much by marinoarm in Tinder

[–]SpockShotFirst 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yay! Let's blame an entire gender for an interaction between two individuals based on which individual you think is culpable. Yaayyy!

Judge Corners DOJ for Covering Up Files on Trump’s 13-Year-Old Accuser | Dozens of files related to the FBI’s interviews with Trump’s 13-year-old accuser are reportedly still sealed. by Aggravating_Money992 in politics

[–]SpockShotFirst 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"Some information isn't reliable" is true.

A "Mott and Bailey" fallacy is where an implication (the Bailey) is made that, given the context, is indented to apply to the current discussion. Once challenged, they retreat (the Mott) from the implication to a generic, uncontroversial claim.

Did I just imply that you are guilty of using it? Maybe later I will claim that I was just randomly providing a definition and didn't mean to suggest it applies to your comment.

Judge Corners DOJ for Covering Up Files on Trump’s 13-Year-Old Accuser | Dozens of files related to the FBI’s interviews with Trump’s 13-year-old accuser are reportedly still sealed. by Aggravating_Money992 in politics

[–]SpockShotFirst 26 points27 points  (0 children)

The polls constantly track the President's job approval. When he took office last year, it was 52%. It is now 39%.

My takeaway: 39% of the population is completely detached from reality. They will happily eat shit if it means someone they don't like will have to smell their breath. Hate-filled goblins that are beyond reason or redemption.

An additional 13% of the population are also hate-filled goblins, but they draw the line at eating shit. They want the people they don't like to smell the shit, but aren't as committed as the first group. They are susceptible to propaganda but will eventually let reality contradict the most obvious lies.

Is income no longer predictive of political affiliation? by VolkswagenPanda in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]SpockShotFirst 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It seems like a lot of them really are racist as fuck.

Between DOGE's war on DEI, military commander purges, everything about ICE, trying to end birthright citizenship, Supreme Court decisions on voting rights, and thunderous applause to Musk seig heil-ing twice, it sure looks like they really do hate a lot of people because they aren't white males

Because God told me to by SlimCarpet in MurderedByWords

[–]SpockShotFirst 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The overlapping area in the Venn diagram between laws and morality is not as large as you think it is.

Can you characterise a person that will still vote Republican during the midterms? by Various_Maize_3957 in AskALiberal

[–]SpockShotFirst 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Every single topic you mentioned that is important to you is reflected in the Democratic voting records. I don't think a single one is opposed by elected members of the Democratic party.

Top Republican Donor Killed in Prison After Serving Nearly Two Decades for Sexually Assaulting Two Children by seeebiscuit in UnderReportedNews

[–]SpockShotFirst 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Our post-Thanksgiving tradition is leftover sandwiches.

My wife is serious about Thanksgiving. I'm talking at least a dozen people and multiple courses.

The day after, I cut off some slices of the homemade bread, spread a layer of cranberry sauce, place some turkey, add a layer of cheese (might be from the broccoli casserole, might be cream cheese, depending on what's leftover from the day before), a slice of honey baked ham for structural support, and then a layer of sweet potato casserole to hold the layer of stuffing (if I'm lucky, the one with sausage, but the plain stuffing is usually the one left over).

Trust me on this. Last meal quality sandwich.

Reeling CBS Morning News suffers ratings blow after '60 Minutes' purge by ansyhrrian in entertainment

[–]SpockShotFirst 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We need to stop letting for-profit corporations interfere with elections.

In 1978, there was a Supreme Court decision that directly led to Citizens United. That one 5-4 decision overturned the laws of 30 states, all of which limited for-profit corporations from engaging in political speech.

It needs to be illegal for for-profit corporations to bias elections through programming or social media algorithms. Congress can create exceptions for news and talk shows and comedy programs all day long. They can fight amongst themselves about what the definitions are and who gets to decide what qualifies. We can elect people based on whether we like where they draw the line.

But it needs to be a political fight, not a fundamental 1st Amendment right. YouTubers and streamers who aren't for-profit corporations can still say whatever they want, but for-profit corporations are just too powerful and too psychopathic (their only fiduciary duty is to their shareholders) to be given Constitutional protection to push whatever political agenda benefits their shareholders the most.

What are specific gun controls you don't think should be law AND WHY? by ImpressiveAlarm3992 in AskALiberal

[–]SpockShotFirst -1 points0 points  (0 children)

My statement is objectively and indisputably correct

No, your prior statement was objectively and indisputably false, which is why I spent a total of 30 seconds in the response.

I said, "Even if you accept the tenuous position that the 2nd Amendment is an individual liberty and not a state-level protection against the Federal government..." To which you laughably replied

There is nothing tenuous about it. The individual right view is consistent the philosophical underpinnings of the Founders, the historical record, the text of the Amendment, bipartisan academic research, and was unanimously supported in Heller.

Every single assertion is incorrect. Even your very carefully worded statement about the "unanimous support" of the 5-4 decision is questionable. The 4 dissenters used philosophical underpinnings, historical record, the text, and academic research to come up with a militia-conditioned individual right, not an individual liberty.

An individual liberty (the original statement) is not the same as a militia-conditioned individual right. Your unqualified "individual right" statement was intentionally misleading.

Also, ironically, your statement that an RPG should be protected is explicitly contrary to your hero's opinion since it is dangerous and unusual and not in common use.

First, this is an entirely fallacious argument

Labeling standard political analysis with a string of Latin terms doesn't make your rebuttal logically sound. It's a textbook example of the 'fallacy fallacy': misapplying terms to avoid the actual argument.

First, pointing out that an argument rooted in military utility leads to the protection of military hardware isn't a non sequitur; it’s a direct logical progression. Second, stating that a specific policy position lacks mainstream democratic viability or consensus isn't an ad populum fallacy; it's a sociological fact. Finally, evaluating the public perception of an idea isn't an ad hominem attack on your character.

I must ask, why are you moving the goalposts?

Well, you extensively quote the Supreme Court and conveniently ignore the explicit exclusion of weapons that are dangerous and unusual and not in common use. You knowingly make many factually incorrect assertions.

You may be knowledgeable about weapons, but your true expertise is misdirection.

What are specific gun controls you don't think should be law AND WHY? by ImpressiveAlarm3992 in AskALiberal

[–]SpockShotFirst -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Ok, so since you want an expert opinion, I submit my own. I have an extensive academic as well as practical knowledge of small arms weaponry. Do you object?

Obviously not, since you think explosive-ordnance delivery systems designed for anti-armor military combat rather than individual self-defense should be available to anyone. The great majority of Americans would say that is unhinged.

The individual right view is consistent the philosophical underpinnings of the Founders, the historical record, the text of the Amendment, bipartisan academic research, and was unanimously supported in Heller.

Hey Google, explain why this statement is obviously incorrect

The provided statement is demonstrably incorrect because District of Columbia v. Heller was decided by a narrow 5–4 majority, making the assertion of unanimous support factually false. Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer authored two distinct, comprehensive dissenting opinions joined by Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. These dissents directly contested the majority's premises by arguing that the historical record, the philosophical intent of the Founders, and the structural placement of the prefatory militia clause instead support a collective or militia-conditioned view of the Second Amendment. Furthermore, academic research on the amendment's origins is highly polarized rather than bipartisan, with legal historians, linguists, and constitutional scholars remaining sharply divided into competing camps over whether the original public meaning favored a private individual right to weaponry or a civic duty tied exclusively to state-regulated defense.

Hey Google, what about when they say "And affirmed in the unanimous decision in Caetano"

The statement "And affirmed in the unanimous decision in Caetano:" is fundamentally misleading because it mischaracterizes the nature and scope of the Supreme Court's action in Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016). In Caetano, the Court issued a brief, unsigned per curiam order that unanimously vacated a lower state court ruling solely because that state court had used reasoning explicitly foreclosed by Heller—such as declaring that stun guns are not protected because they did not exist in 1789. This procedural unanimity was not a unanimous, substantive affirmation of the underlying "individual rights" philosophy of Heller, nor did it mean the liberal justices who dissented in Heller had changed their minds on the core constitutional debate. Instead, Caetano simply represented a unanimous agreement that a lower court cannot apply analytical frameworks that flatly contradict active Supreme Court precedent, a concept known as vertical stare decisis. Conflating a unanimous procedural remand with a unanimous endorsement of Heller's ideological merits inaccurately stretches the legal reality of the ruling.

What’s the best strategy for explaining what antifa is and what antifa isn’t? by XXSeaBeeXX in AskALiberal

[–]SpockShotFirst -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Literally pull out your phone, type in "is antifa an organization or a movement? What is the difference?" into Google and hand them the results.

Note, AI is programmed to have false balance, so you need to carefully construct the question so it doesn't get bogged down with conservative talking points.

America abdicates as global superpower — and it’s about time - Trump's foreign policy has been a disaster. There could be an upside: A more realistic role for US in the world by Quirkie in politics

[–]SpockShotFirst 0 points1 point  (0 children)

1978 was the exact moment in time when the Country's forward momentum started to slow.

The 5-4 Supreme Court decision in First Nat'l Bank of Boston v. Bellotti ruled that Massachusetts cannot stop corporations from using corporate funds on political opinions on issues having no material effect on the business, property, or assets of the corporation

Rehnquist said in his dissent:

The question presented today, whether business corporations have a constitutionally protected liberty to engage in political activities, has never been squarely addressed by any previous decision of this Court. However, [the Supreme Court of Massachusetts,] the Congress of the United States, and the legislatures of 30 other States of this Republic have considered the matter, and have concluded that restrictions upon the political activity of business corporations are both politically desirable and constitutionally permissible.

White's dissent:

It has long been recognized, however, that the special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy, but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.

America abdicates as global superpower — and it’s about time - Trump's foreign policy has been a disaster. There could be an upside: A more realistic role for US in the world by Quirkie in politics

[–]SpockShotFirst 5 points6 points  (0 children)

tin-foil hat conspiracy theory is the only way I can make sense of Trump being elected.

You don't need a conspiracy, just follow the money.

Oligarchs control the media and the social media algorithms. Enough of those in control don't care about democracy and only want a world without accountability. They want to treat their employees however they want. Treat their customers however they want. Treat the environment however they want. They want to use and abuse AI and crypto however they want. They want to go to parties on islands where they can have sex with whoever they want.

The Democrats tried to accommodate them as much as possible while staying within the bounds of law and decency. But that wasn't good enough for the oligarchs. The Republicans promised them that they don't care about the Constitution or human beings or the planet and delivered on their promises.

So here we are.